The Kaiser's Long Stare

What 'The Radetzky March' tells us about the decline of the American Empire

Franz Josef (1830-1916), Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary

Good morning from Vienna, where I’ll be for the next few days attending the humanities festival. I’m participating on Monday on a panel to discuss the legacy of Philip Rieff, one of the twentieth century’s greatest prophets. Meanwhile, I’m going to pour myself into revising once again my manuscript, after a shot in the arm of adrenalin by my reading of UFO/tech as an emerging religion. That was the missing piece.

Last night I took my son and some young friends to dinner here, to celebrate his 24th birthday. At the table was a Viennese Catholic couple. I asked if they had read the Joseph Roth 1932 novel The Radetzky March , but they had not. It is always a joy to tell others about this great novel. I want to talk about it a bit today, drawing on some things I wrote about it six years ago, but updating it.

The novel examines the slow decay and final collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire through the eyes of three generations of the von Trotta family. To be precise, it’s through the eyes of three von Trotta men, all of them military officers. I’ll try to write about it below without spoilers.

The story begins at the 1859 Battle of Solferino, a turning point in the Empire’s history; its loss at Solferino marks the beginning of the Empire’s decline, completed by its destruction in World War I. The musical piece titled “The Radetzky March” (you’ve heard it) was composed in 1848 by Johann Strauss the elder, to celebrate a military victory by Field Marshal Radetzky. It became a favorite of the Austrians. In the novel, it symbolizes the glory days of the fading Empire. Whenever the characters hear it, they are filled with warm, patriotic nostalgia. It’s like “The Stars And Stripes Forever” is to us Americans.

In the opening scene, the young Austrian Kaiser Franz Joseph, who was the last European monarch to lead his troops in battle, is saved from an enemy sniper by the quick thinking of Lieutenant Joseph Trotta, an infantry lieutenant. The grateful monarch awards Trotta the highest Imperial honors, and ennobles him. Baron von Trotta, who comes from Slovenian peasant stock, is uncomfortable as a nobleman. Even his elderly father treats him differently. When he discovers that official Austrian school textbooks embellish the act of the “Hero of Solferino,” the baron requests an audience with the Kaiser, and personally protests the dishonesty. The Kaiser doesn’t understand his objection. Sure, the historians are exaggerating, but it’s a noble lie, one designed to bolster the patriotism of the young. The baron leaves angry.

His only son, Franz von Trotta, on orders from his father, foregoes a military career, and becomes a civil servant, a highly respected position in the Empire. The junior von Trotta hero-worships the Kaiser and everything about the Empire. He is a stickler for protocol. His son, Carl Joseph, enters the cavalry as an officer. Most of the novel has to do with the two von Trotta men raised in nobility. The elder, the founder of the young dynasty, exists mostly as a portrait hanging on the wall, which functions as a sort of family icon.

Joseph Roth was a self-described conservative, a Jew who, late in life, converted to Catholicism, though I read somewhere that his conversion was more of an attempt to regain the lost Empire that he loved than an act of true religion. The Radetzky March is a kind of autopsy of that Empire’s decline and fall. I say “kind” of autopsy because nowhere does Roth contemplate geopolitical causes for the Empire’s collapse. He only observes, with profound social and psychological insight, the fact of its collapse, as lived by the von Trotta men. Remember, Roth, who wrote the book in 1932, mourned for the Empire, but who diagnosed the inner sickness that made it so fragile.

From a 2004 New Yorker essay:

In one of Roth’s late novels, “The Emperor’s Tomb,” a character says that Austria-Hungary was never a political state; it was a religion. James Wood, in an excellent essay on Roth, says yes, that’s how Roth saw it, and he made it profound by showing that the state disappoints as God does, “by being indescribable, by being too much.” I would put it a little differently. For Roth, the state is a myth, which, like other myths (Christianity, Judaism, the Austrian Idea), is an organizer of experience, a net of stories and images in which we catch our lives, and understand them. When such a myth fails, nothing is left: no meaning, no emotion, even. Disasters in Roth’s books tend to occur quietly, modestly. In “The Emperor’s Tomb,” the street lights long for morning, so that they can be extinguished.

The Radetzky March novelizes the death of the Imperial myth — and, as the New Yorker essay avers, the way in which most myths die. More on this in a moment.

Having read Stefan Zweig’s 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday, I understood Radetzky better. Zweig was a friend of Roth’s, and a bit older than he. In his memoir, Zweig hymns the stability and beauty of fin de siècle Hapsburg Vienna, but then he also laments how its rigid rules and old-fashioned ethos deeply frustrated the young, and, in the early 20th century, became a dam that could barely hold back the combustible energies of the rising generation. As we know, the Great War unleashed them all, and destroyed that world.

Radetzky is set mostly in the period in which the young chafed under the pointlessness of traditions. In the most painful episode of the book, two young men are bound by the military’s code of honor to fight a duel to the death over an insulting remark one made to the other. Honor is everything in that hierarchical, monarchical world. Baron von Trotta, a hidebound state bureaucrat, lives his life in the strictest observation of protocol and social etiquette — to the point where he only sees others, including his son, according to their assigned roles in the system.

His son, Carl Joseph, is also part of this world, but not a good fit for it. What stands out about both men is how inauthentic they are, how little imagination or agency they have. Theyare both conformists, believers in a system whose perpetuation requires stifling ordinary human feeling, and even lying to oneself about reality to keep the myth alive. One effect of this is that they were unable to anticipate and to accommodate revolutionary changes roiling European societies as the age of mass democracy rose. I recall that Zweig emphasized in his memoir that nobody saw the disaster of the Great War coming, and that everybody (well, “everybody” he knew in his prosperous Viennese circles) felt quite certain that peace, prosperity, and progress would last forever.

The Empire would be eternal because, for Roth’s protagonists, it had to be eternal. It was all they knew, and its story was the story by which the understood themselves, and how to live. James Wood, in a 1999 review of one of Roth’s other novels:

Roth’s heroes are victims of the Hapsburg Empire, contaminated by what they so love, which is the paternal security and presence of the Empire. Because the Empire is everything to them, they tend to convert metaphysics into the terms of the Empire; they make a religion of the Hapsburgs. This is constantly hinted at in Rebellion: “Then he remembered he didn’t have his permit anymore. All at once he felt he was alive, but without any authority to live. He was nothing anymore!” So reflects Andreas; it is the Empire that gives him authority to exist, that tells him what to do, and promises to look after him. In The Radetzky March, Lieutenant Trotta vainly looks to the army, and to the Emperor, to instruct him in the skirmishes of life. In Roth’s novels, marching orders are more than merely figurative. They are everything.

But just as God is the source of both good and evil, then if the Empire has truly been made into a religion, it is responsible for all that is wicked as well as what is fine in the world. And correspondingly, this religion produces both devotion and secular rebellion against itself. This is Roth’s political theodicy, and the source of his complexity.

What makes Radetzky resonate so deeply is that the story it tells is a universal one, though it happens to be set in a particular time and place. It is a story about the effect of time on all human institutions and ways of seeing the world. It’s impossible to read Radetzky without wondering if our own liberal democratic institutions and ways of ordering our experiences are declining as surely as the Austro-Hungarian monarchy — and we can’t see it clearly because we are caught up inside it, and we have powerful internal confirmation biases telling us that something this fine should be eternal.

Reading Radetzky with historical awareness, we know that what is to succeed the Empire will be much, much worse. The Versailles Treaty broke the Empire up into smaller nations, and established them as democracies, but democracy was far too weak to subdue the roiling passions of the peoples, especially amid the defeated nations’ long economic crisis following the war. Into the void, eventually, stepped Hitler, and then, after the Second World War, for all the former Imperial lands save for Austria, came Soviet communism.

Still, it would have taken an army of geniuses to have figured out how to save the monarchy. Roth has one of his characters say that war would be the end of the monarchy — yet the Austro-Hungarian empire was built on militarism. Without something to do, the army stagnates; this is the meaning of Carl Joseph’s moral dissolution at a grim border posting. The Empire’s doom, in this sense, is tragic, almost inevitable. I say “almost,” because it is conceivable that something could have been done to have averted the cataclysm, though heaven knows what.

The problem is that the people who would have been capable of making the kinds of changes that might have saved the system in some form were incapable of thinking outside the system. Consider how hard this would be for anybody, in any place and time. As Kierkegaard said, life has to be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards.

Think about how the Republican Party, for example, could not see Trump coming, even though the signs were there. Think about how incapable its leaders were of making the kinds of changes that might have preserved its order and their power — this, because they were creatures of the system (including a system of thought) that created them. The memory of Ronald Reagan played the mythic role of the Kaiser. Or think beyond the GOP, to the entire system. We can see that big, big changes need to be made, especially economically. But where is the will to make the changes? And who knows exactly what to do? We should also see, but many do not, that the way we are living in general is unsustainable. But we aren’t at the crisis point yet — though we are far closer to it than we were when I first read The Radetzky March in 2017 and wrote most of these lines.

Reading Radetzky, you notice the stark difference between the worldview of Franz von Trotta, the father, and his son Carl Joseph. Franz has not lost faith in the monarchy and the way of life it fosters. Carl Joseph’s faith slowly abandons him, but he has nothing with which to replace it. We readers know that the world of the fathers, who believed so strongly in the old order, will condemn their sons to death in the trenches. They did not meet their fate in spite of the old order, but to a great degree because of it.

I wonder if we are seeing something like this emerge today, in our country, and in the West more broadly. Back in 2017, Bill Bishop wrote in The Washington Post that modern life itself is working to rob us of our ability to trust our institutions. Excerpts:

You can hear similarly fretful discussions in dozens of other professions. The president has maligned politicians, scientists, judges, teachers, labor union leaders and intelligence officials, among others. “Donald Trump’s most damaging legacy may be a lower-trust America,” the Economist’s Lexington column predicted. Trust in American institutions, however, has been in decline for some time. Trump is merely feeding on that sentiment.

The leaders of once-powerful institutions are desperate to resurrect the faith of the people they serve. They act like they have misplaced a credit card and must find the number so that a replacement can be ordered and then FedEx-ed, if possible overnight.

But that delivery truck is never coming. The decline in trust isn’t because of what the press (or politicians or scientists) did or didn’t do. Americans didn’t lose their trust because of some particular event or scandal. And trust can’t be regained with a new app or even an outbreak of competence. To believe so is to misunderstand what was lost.

Bishop explained back then that you can’t simply blame Vietnam, Watergate, “the Sixties,” or other discrete events for this loss of trust. It’s liquid modernity itself:

Everything about modern life works against community and trust. Globalization and urbanization put people in touch with the different and the novel. Our economy rewards initiative over conformity, so that the weight of convention and tradition doesn’t squelch the latest gizmo from coming to the attention of the next Bill Gates. Whereas parents in the 1920s said it was most important for their children to be obedient, that quality has declined in importance, replaced by a desire for independence and autonomy. Widespread education gives people the tools to make up their own minds. And technology offers everyone the chance to be one’s own reporter, broadcaster and commentator.

We have become, in Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s description, “artists of our own lives,” ignoring authorities and booting traditions while turning power over to the self. The shift in outlook has been all-encompassing. It has changed the purpose of marriage (once a practical arrangement, now a means of personal fulfillment). It has altered the relationship between citizens and the state (an all-volunteer fighting force replacing the military draft). It has transformed the understanding of art (craftsmanship and assessment are out; free-range creativity and self-promotion are in). It has even inverted the orders of humanity and divinity (instead of obeying a god, now we choose one).

People enjoy their freedoms. There’s no clamoring for a return to gray flannel suits and deferential housewives. Constant social retooling and choice come with costs, however. Without the authority and guidance of institutions to help order their lives, many people feel overwhelmed and adrift. “Depression is truly our modern illness,” writes French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg, with rates 20 to 30 times what they were just two generations ago.

Since Bishop wrote that, we have lived through the Covid trauma, the Summer of Floyd and its ramifications, and transgender mania. The latter two, we are still living with. Every time you see yet another video of stores being ransacked by looters, usually black, while nobody does anything, you are looking at the long tail of 2020. As Andrew Sullivan pointed out in a sharp essay yesterday, the Left in institutional power has brought us to the point were Martin Luther King Jr. could not give a TED talk today. Sullivan goes on to say that those who say we are past peak-woke are deceiving themselves:

It’s tempting to believe this, especially if you’re just as irritated by anti-woke diatribes. And there is undeniably a vibe-shift away from the moral panic over “white supremacy” in 2020. Crude, reductionist, unfalsifiable doctrines bore even the faithful after a while. But virtually nothing has changed in higher education; public high schools are still teaching the core concepts of CRT; kindergarteners are still being told to pick a sex and a pronoun; children with gender dysphoria are still having their bodies irreversibly altered. The Democrats are still on board. So is corporate America, as we saw with the cringe overkill of Pride Month. As for Boston University, its response to the Kendi mess is that it will “absolutely not” abandon his dumb-as-a-post concept of “antiracism,” or the center devoted to it.

Ask yourself: in which institutions do you have trust? I’m not talking about believing that they always and everywhere do the right thing, but a belief that they can generally be counted on to do the right thing. I cannot think of a single one. Maybe the police? I certainly don’t have faith in the churches — “faith” not in the theological sense, but in the sense that they are institutions that are fit to purpose today. Those churches that aren’t actively trying to do harm seem to be mostly filled with weak men who just don’t want to cause trouble. I don’t have faith in the federal government, or the military, or law, medicine, business, media, academia … the list goes on.

I don’t know about you, but in my case, it’s not really an angry thing, not anymore. It’s just a shrug. There’s a part of me that, knowing Hannah Arendt’s warning that a loss of faith in institutions is a precursor to totalitarianism, is terrified of these conclusions. Yet I can’t make myself unsee the things we’ve all seen these past few years. Here’s an example that I saw just this week: The major academic organization for anthropologists cancelled a talk about the gender binary. Why? From its statement:

The AAA and CASCA boards reached a decision to remove the session “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program. This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, in order to ensure the safety and dignity of all of our members, as well as the scientific integrity of the program.

The first ethical principle in AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility is to “Do no harm.” The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community. It commits one of the cardinal sins of scholarship—it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.

“Contrary to the settled science in our discipline.” Do you understand this? These scientists have gouged their eyes out so they don’t have to see one of the most easily observable biological facts of our species. They have declared the gender binary to be unscientific. No civilization that subjugates scientific knowledge to ideology can survive. Why would any bright young person want to enter into a scholarly field knowing that there are questions that cannot be asked, and things that cannot be said, not because they aren’t true, but because the gatekeepers fear they might be?

Nellie Bowles pointed out in yesterday’s newsletter from The Free Press that the NYT’s lead Covid reporter, who once called the lab leak theory “racist,” addressed the Harvard school of public health the other day to gripe about all the “disinformation” that anti-vaxxers put out. Harvard, one of the most important institutions in the US, and indeed the Western world, didn’t bat an eye. The reporter remains faithful to the Narrative.

I could go on and on with anecdotes about the dramatic failure of institutions and institutional leaders, but you get the point. The main lesson of The Radetzsky March is that if you have lost the culture — by which I mean if the ideals upon which the culture is built no longer live in the hearts and minds of a people — neither Constitution, nor Catechism, nor President, Congress, Kaiser nor Pope will save you. That is, the external manifestations of a political, social, religious order, cannot survive the pressures of the world without an animating spirit within.

As mentioned above, in Radetzky, the third von Trotta generation can’t understand what sense any of this makes. He’s just drifting along with the flow of history, neither acting to defend the old order, in which he no longer believes, nor to advance a new one. His death is absurd and meaningless. If a young American soldier died by a Russian bullet fighting in Ukraine, what would it mean to Americans today? To die by a German or a Japanese bullet in World War II — absolutely meaningful. To die in Iraq — much less so, but at least many of them believed, however mistakenly, that America was delivering Iraqis from dictatorship and spreading freedom, order, and decency around the world.

But today? It is in no way to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to wonder why farm boys from Nebraska should get their heads blown off to repel Russians from Donbas. What kind of social and cultural order would we be defending? The sacrality of transgenders? A social order that institutionalizes a racial spoils system, in which 94 percent of the new hires in 2021 were non-whites, despite whites still being a majority of the US population?

Who wants to defend a social order that is busy destroying the integrity of its normative institutions to implement a radical left ideology that has captured the elites? An order that denies and stigmatizes facts that hurt the feelings of politically preferred minorities? A political order that lacks the will to defend the borders of its nations, both in the US and in Europe? An order that believes sexually mutilating its own children can be a very good thing, and that traditional Christians are the enemies of progress?

The kind of young Americans who might have been persuaded to defend this order are precisely the ones who are being demonized by our military leadership today. The kind of young Americans they want to sign up aren’t going to do it, because they’ve been persuaded by years of left-wing classroom propaganda that America and the West are nothing more than racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic exploiters.

Who can believe in all that? Who wants to fight for it, to kill and die for it? These questions may be unthinkable to older Americans, who, like the second Baron von Trotta, were formed by old-fashioned patriotism. Yet here we are today, a country led by a ruling class made up of old people as overripe as the Kaiser near the end of his reign. In the follow-up to The Radetzky March, titled The Emperor’s Tomb, another Trotta, Franz, who fought in the Great War, reflects:

I lived in the cheerful, carefree company of young aristocrats whose company, second only to that of artists, I loved best under the old Empire. With them I shared a skeptical frivolity, a melancholy curiosity, a wicked insouciance, and the pride of the doomed, all signs of the disintegration which at that time we still did not see coming.  Above the ebullient glasses from which we drank, invisible Death was already crossing his bony hands.  We swore without malice and blasphemed without thought.  Alone and old, distant and omnipresent in the great and brilliant pattern of the Empire, lived and ruled the old Emperor, Franz Joseph.  Perhaps in the hidden depths of our souls there slumbered that awareness which is called foreboding, the awareness above all that the old Emperor was dying, day by day with every day that he lived, and with him the Monarchy--not so much our Fatherland as our Empire; something greater, broader, more all-embracing than a Fatherland.  Our wit and our frivolity came from hearts that were heavy with the feeling that we were dedicated to death, from a foolish pleasure in everything which asserted life: from pleasure in balls, new wine, girls food, long walks, eccentricities of every sort, senseless escapades, self-destructive irony, unfettered criticism: pleasure in the Prater, in the giant Ferris wheel, in Punch and Judy shows, masquerades, ballets, light-hearted lovemaking in quiet boxes at the Court Opera, in manoeuvres, which we mostly missed, and pleasure even in those illnesses which love more than once bestowed upon us.

Those sentiments seem so far from us — they were written a hundred years ago — yet strangely so near. It seems to me that with many of us, there lives an awareness which is called foreboding, an awareness above all that the old order is dying, something greater, broader, more all-embracing than a country. Michael Brendan Dougherty senses it. Excerpts:

Have you ever seen a big mechanical breakdown? The arms and belts of a machine get into some kind of hinky relationship and begin dancing. There’s this moment of suspense about whether the process under way will slow down and the machine will implode relatively safely. But, as often as not, the problem is that inertial and load-bearing parts of the system have broken away, so everything just speeds up terrifyingly. You know an arm or belt is going to escape its current centripetal motion and just launch at terminal velocity. You can just hope that you’re not standing in its way.

That’s how I feel watching the 2024 election shaping up. Some of the brakes in the system are clearly not working. A man who has been indicted four times for 91 criminal acts shouldn’t be running for president of the United States. And he really shouldn’t be the front-runner. And yet he is. Also, the sitting president’s Justice Department shouldn’t have an open investigation against its chief political rival, one that will allow the attorney general or his deputies to bring forth testimony and hearings at times that will manipulate the political cycle. None of this should happen, but we all feel that each action — Trump running again, Biden indicting him — is the logical and necessary consequence of some other previous failure. Like a mechanical breakdown, the physical laws of the universe are being obeyed — all the political momentum is understandable and even somewhat predictable. But the engineering failure guarantees that the result is a disaster.

MBD says that the Democrats believe that democracy itself is at stake in this coming election, but have as their standard-bearer an 80-year-old in obvious steep cognitive decline, who makes the old Kaiser look like Schwarzenegger in his prime. The Republicans believe that the Left has captured all the country’s institutions, and are weaponizing them against conservatives, yet their favored champion is a deeply flawed man who proved in his first term that he could easily be defeated by those captured institutions.

None of this makes sense. MBD:

What does it say about our civilization that we’re all just sitting here, watching this unfold as if it were a TikTok video from the third world, and not the fate of our country?

A very good answer to this question can be found in the pages of The Radetzky March. I hope you will read it.

Last point today, then I need to go out into the city. The journalist James Meek once chose a novel by Italo Calvino as one of his Five Best Books about End Of Empire (Radetzky March was number one). Meek writes:

Because what Calvino is saying is, that in order to control an empire what you need are two, completely contradictory, mutually cancelling qualities. What it requires of you is the ability to imagine, to fantasise – but also to know the real facts of what is going on. You can’t get by with the facts alone, because you cannot possibly know them all, and so you need great imaginative power, but neither can you get by with imagination alone, because you must know what people are actually thinking. All empires are doomed to fail for this reason. Their rulers are either overwhelmed in detail or betrayed by the failure of their imagination.

My sense is that our leadership class is betrayed by a failure of its imagination. It is so overwhelmed by the panicky moral force of the successor ideology to liberalism (wokeness), and so lacking in confidence in classical liberal values, that they come to believe that the entire world is like a college campus, and that administering it requires the skills and techniques of a corporate Human Resources department. They could not imagine that Iraq and Afghanistan could not be made into Western-style liberal democracies. They cannot imagine that Russia is unlikely to be defeated in Ukraine, for reasons that would be clear if their eyes weren’t blinded by ideology. They cannot imagine that much of the world doesn’t want what they’re selling, and that many in their own country have no faith in them.

It can’t last. It won’t last. But history warns that whatever comes next is likely to be far worse.