times.
The bitter inter-ethnic conflicts which accompanied Eastern European nationalism have been best chronicled with respect to Prague, which does not necessarily mean that they were sharper there than elsewhere. But with that qualification, the fate of Mozart in Prague in 1913 is a good illustration of rival symbolic nationalism. The Prague Society for the Promotion of German Sciences, Arts and Literature wanted to put up a statue of Mozart in front of the (German) Estates Theatre, where Don Giovanni was first performed in 1787. However, this required the use of a small piece of municipal land outside the theatre. The city council, Czech-dominated since 1861, rejected the petition, officially for traffic reasons.38
However, the modern history of East-Central Europe should not be reduced to national conflicts. It too was part of the European route of continuisme and class. The new Balkan states of Bulgaria, Greece and Romania, with their powerful German kings, exemplified an eventful but nevertheless gradual transition from princely absolutism to the nation-state, although not to democratic monarchies. The modern history of East-Central Europe is much more dramatic than that of north-western Europe, with the gradual national evolution of its capitals inter-foliated by moments of revolution.
For all its national/ethnic complexity and conflicts, the Strip also experienced the typical European modern primacy of class. Its major intra-state violent conflicts were structured not by ethnicity or religion but class. The Finnish Civil War of 1918 pitted Red industrial workers and crofters against the White yeomanry and professional-managerial strata. The Baltic post–World War I wars had a triangular shape, pitting Balto-German landowners (with German troops); Estonian-Latvian farmers (with a tiny professional stratum), helped by British military; and Estonian-Latvian-Lithuanian workers and worker-soldiers against each other. The Budapest Commune of 1919 rallied urban workers (and a large part of the Jewish intelligentsia) against the upper and middle classes. The Greek post-post–World War II civil war had perhaps a more ideological character, dividing the popular classes, but its poles were the Communistled popular resistance against the Nazi occupation, on one side, and on the other the collaborationist turned Anglophile upper and middle classes.
The Pre-National Central Powers
During World War I, Austria-Hungary and Germany were, in neutral speech, often referred to as the Central Powers for their location in the middle of Europe. The Habsburg monarchy never became a nation-state, but from its stiff neo-absolutism, after 1860 it gradually came to accommodate national elements. With Russian help and under some able military commanders it finally survived and crushed the revolution of 1848. What started its decline and increasingly accommodationist stance was the loss of its Italian lands in 1859 to French and Piedmontese armies, and the decisive blow came in 1866 with its defeat to Prussia at Königgrätz (also known as Sadowa).
In Vienna, what became the grandiose Ringstrasse around the Baroque inner city out of the open military grounds around the city wall, the glacis, was announced by the Emperor in 1857: ‘It is My will that …’39 The original plan was for new military barracks as well as cultural institutions and a dynastic votive church.40 The plan included a city hall – elective municipal government was being adopted in Austria – but no parliament.*
With the defeat at Königgrätz, Habsburg absolutism was doomed and the Ringstrasse changed its character in a bourgeois national direction. The liberal city of Vienna built itself a majestic Gothic city hall, which was interpreted as referring to the proud and autonomous Flemish cities, once part of Habsburg lands. Nearby, Theophil Hansen designed a new version of his Athens Academy as an impressive Reichsrath (Council of the Realm, in fact Parliament), but without any national symbolism. Already, in the early 1860s, a society for the promotion of the arts had petitioned for a monumental programme in honour of non-royals, but mostly of aristocrats connected to the city; it was effectuated in 1867. The liberal city leadership then expanded the programme, primarily with respect to great artists.41
1867 was also the year of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise and the establishment of Austria-Hungary under a double monarch: emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. Financed by rich land rents and soaring wheat exports, the ruling Hungarian aristocrats embarked on a very ambitious national course, peaking in the millennium celebration in 1896 of the Magyar conquest of Hungary, including a World Exhibition and the world’s second underground line (after London’s). The emperor and his Vienna government had to acquiesce. In 1882 a statue of the poet and 1848 revolutionary initiator Sándor Petőfi was erected in Budapest. In 1894 the remains of the exiled national revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth were brought back to the city and given a grand official burial. In 1904 the world’s largest parliamentary building, the Országház (House of the Nation), was opened on the Pest side of the Danube, a duel in stone with the Habsburg Castle on the Buda Hills across the river. In location and in layout it refers to the Palace of Westminster, but it is built in a hotchpotch of historical styles, crowned by a gilded dome.
Prague was part of the Austrian half of the double monarchy and since the 1860s under Czech city government, with the support of which the Czech community built its own national institutions, from the neo-Renaissance National Museum towering over central Wenceslas Square to the Art Nouveau Obecní Dům (Municipal House), an entertainment centre meant to overshadow the German casino. The last national challenge the Catholic emperor had to swallow before the war was the city’s decision to put up a huge monument in Old Town Square to the heretic Czech preacher Jan Hus for the quincentenary of his burning at the stake in 1415.
Berlin is another capital where, beneath a dramatic history, there is a strong streak of continuity between the pre-modern and the modern, between the pre-national and the national. The latter does not constitute a fateful German Sonderweg (special path) in contrast to an enlightened ‘Western’ mainstream. It is a variant of the pathway of London, for example. In contrast to Habsburg Vienna, Hohenzollern Berlin did take on a few national features out of the Napoleonic Wars, which unleashed a Prussian/German nationalism similar only to the Spanish. Post-Napoleonic Berlin got a national monument, an off-stage temple-like structure on a hill topped by an iron cross, the new rank-independent medal for military valour. When the quadriga on top of the Brandenburg Gate was brought back to Berlin (having been looted by Napoleon and taken to Paris), the peace goddess Eirene was replaced by Prussian Victoria with an iron cross on her spear. Non-dynastic military commanders Bülow and Scharnhorst flanked the exquisite Neue Wache (New Guardhouse) in the city centre. Urban hubs were renamed after Prussian victories against Napoleon: Leipziger Platz (after the battle in 1813) and Pariser Platz (after the city it conquered and occupied in 1814).42
Nevertheless, Prussia remained a dynastic state. Nor did German unification in 1871 create an unambiguous nation-state. In fact, its act of creation was almost provocatively dynastic and non-national. The German Reich was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles (after the crushing defeat of the Second French Empire) by assembled German princes. No elected representatives of the nation or of Berlin were invited.
The Wilhelmine capital of the Reich rapidly developed into the national centre of Germany, with fast population growth and economic as well as cultural concentration. Although it never reached the national dominance of London or Paris, it was the main node of Germany’s railway system, its main industrial city, its culturally leading city. But the realm was a federated monarchy with a substantial set of princes, from kings to dukes, under the emperor. Symbolically, the dynastic maintained the upper hand in Berlin. The main city centre (east of the big Tiergarten park) was dominated by the Imperial Palace, outside of which there was a monumental ensemble with an equestrian statue of the first emperor, appropriately carrying the double name of Emperor Wilhelm–National Monument. Off centre stage in the east was the monumental Reichstag, whose dedication the Emperor had finally agreed to after about a decade of wrangling: ‘To the German People’. The square in front of it was still Königsplatz (Kings’ Square, referring to the kings of Prussia). The imperial family pushed the construction of sixty-six Protestant churches in Berlin, including a new neo-Baroque cathedral in the front of the Imperial Palace
