In his 1883 play Die Türken vor Wien, Richard von Kralik, the Catholic writer and later doyen of Christian Socialism, recounts the story of the 1683 siege of Vienna. Habsburg military heroes, ordinary Viennese Bürger, and the Ottoman grand vizier Kara Mustafa appear on stage in Kralik's retelling of what had become a foundational moment in Austrian historiography. The defeat of the Turks at Vienna in 1683 has been hailed as Austria's finest hour, the Habsburgs' greatest service to Europe, and as the moment when Austria defended all of Western civilization from, among other things, the East, Asian barbarism, and Muslim infidels. Kralik may be the playwright here; but in a preface to the play, he introduces the two figures who are the true sources for his tale of 1683: Lady History and Lady Legend. They work together, each playing her part. Lady History and Lady Legend, he explains, sing in beautiful duet, “both accurate and truthful, neither lying nor inventing.”Footnote 2 Kralik's juxtaposition of history and legend was astute. Any historian looking back to the events of 1683 and the stories that have since accumulated about Austria's “saving the occident” encounters a multi-century work in progress, a story under revision, a tale in which “legends” about coffee (said to be introduced to Europe by Turks fleeing Vienna) and croissants (a bun shaped, suspiciously, like a crescent) persist alongside themes more properly in the domain of “history”: class tensions, national conflict, and church-state relations.Footnote 3
Kralik was writing in the midst of a publishing boom that coincided with the two hundredth anniversary of the siege of Vienna. His play was among sixty-five new titles in the category Jubiläums-literatur published between 1882–1884.Footnote 4 Unlike Kralik, some believed that it was possible (and necessary) to untangle history and legend in the literature on 1683. Victor von Renner, the historian commissioned by the city of Vienna in 1883 to write an objective history of the siege using the “scrutinizing eye of the researcher,” seemed somewhat daunted by the works that had come before him. He observed, “With the books that depict the history of the second siege of Vienna one could fill a library.”Footnote 5 This did not stop Renner himself from publishing another 487 pages on the subject. His scientific account would, he claimed, correct for the “empire of legends” that had grown around this early modern Habsburg triumph. For playwrights, historians, essayists, politicians, and the many journalists whose writings constituted the jubilee literature, the bicentennial of the siege offered an opportunity—or even a mandate—to reflect on the past and to “remember” and “commemorate” victory over the Turks.
Nineteenth-century authors writing about the Turks found a ready readership, and historian Albert Camesina hinted at why this might be so. He observed that 1683 “still lay deep under the ‘level of consciousness’ of the present.”Footnote 6 His best-selling book, Wiens Bedrängnis im Jahre 1683, was written twenty years before the bicentennial and reportedly found a wide audience even among nonacademic readers. The work “had such an appeal among the public that the edition was soon out of stock and copies were selling in the antiquarian market for more than double the original price.”Footnote 7 Camesina's claim that 1683 was still lurking beneath the Austrian present warrants investigation. He raises for us the possibility that public hunger for the Turks was not “really” about Turks at all, nor even about the past. Not surprisingly, reading Kralik, Renner, Camesina and their contemporaries on “the Turks” reveals far more about late-nineteenth-century Austrians, their universe of perceived threats, than it does about the combatants of 1683.
In 1883, playwright J. P. Ostland noted something that recent scholarship on historical commemoration has made abundantly clear: commemoration is the present packaged as the past.Footnote 8 Ostland wrote that Austria of his day was in a kind of a jubilee fever. “We live in a time when jubilees have not only come into fashion, they will also be exploited in every conceivable way.”Footnote 9 To what present purpose could the Turks be exploited 200 years after the siege? What function did the preoccupation with “the Turks” serve at a time when Turks and the Ottoman Empire they ruled had ceased to pose a genuine military threat to Habsburg Central Europe? This essay contends that for late-nineteenth-century Austria, Turks had come to stand in for a more generalized sense of threat. They reappeared year in and year out as the archetypal foe in the Austrian historical imagination because they were, quite simply, rhetorically useful. At various times Austrians have used the idea of an external foe to articulate competing visions of Austrianness. If we analyze the references to the historical Turkish enemy, we find in the bicentennial literature a number of perceived class, national, and religious foes of 1883.
This essay will first describe the events of the 1883 Türkenwoche, a series of events scheduled around the historically significant date of 12 September. It will then explore four internal conflicts that were bubbling below the ostensible commemoration of victory over Turks. First, liberals in power in Vienna's municipal government in the 1880s worried about threats to the Bürgerschaft from below, from a nascent workers' movement and from lower-middle-class “five-gulden men” demanding the franchise. The idea of a city under siege (1683) mapped nicely onto liberals' fears of the lower classes who lived, by and large, in Vienna's outlying districts. Second, German nationalists used the Turkish anniversary to warn against creeping Slavic autonomy within Austria. They took aim at Poles who in 1883 were busy celebrating Polish King Jan Sobieski's role in 1683 and making the same claims about saving all of Christendom that German nationalists wanted for their own. Third, Austrian Catholics used the Türkenwoche to draw reference to dangerous forces of scientific materialism in late-nineteenth-century history writing. And finally, disagreement arose about whether the experiences of 1683 should guide Austrian-Ottoman relations in the present. Catholic orators saw in 1683 an important defensive lesson for the present and future and pushed for an eternal vigilance against Turks in whatever guise. They warned against establishing increased business contacts with the Orient, worried that business-oriented “Turkophiles” had forgotten the lessons of 1683 and were carelessly opening Europe to Mohammedism through trade.
All parties in 1883 using 1683 for rhetorical purposes enlisted Lady History and Lady Legend to varying degrees. They drew on shifting Austrian and European stereotypes of Turks that had evolved over centuries. These include the Turk as infidel Asian barbarian, the nemesis of all that was “the West,” and the Turk as sexually depraved despot.Footnote 10 While some nineteenth-century Orientalist scholars in Austria had argued that Turks, and Muslims more generally, could and should be studied with a scientific detachment, the commemorative discourse of 1883 drew primarily on an older Turk: threatening and dangerous.
12 September and the Türkenwoche 1883
In September 1883, Vienna hosted the Türkenwoche, a week-long series of masses, speeches, processions, theater productions, and an historical exhibit that drew large crowds and brought in the imperial family and Catholic hierarchy from around the Habsburg Empire. Two hundred years earlier, after a siege lasting months, the Turks had been defeated at the Kahlenberg, overlooking Vienna. The date of the battle was 12 September 1683, and its significance was asserted immediately. Pope Innocent XI moved to merge celebration of Mary's birth (8 September) with the commemoration of Kahlenberg four days later. Until the year 1783, when Emperor Joseph II declared an end to the ritual, the blessed victory of 12 September was commemorated in yearly processions.Footnote 11 Planners of the bicentennial envisioned a full week of festivities, and if we include the month-long historical exhibit of Turkish artifacts, the commemoration of victory over the Turks had stretched into a full Türkenmonat.
Precisely what was being commemorated in 1883 was open to interpretation, however. In some accounts, the date 12 September marked a decisive, discrete event. As one author remarked, two hundred years ago, on this day, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, “Christian Europe” had been liberated from “three hundred years of threat from the Muslim crescent.”Footnote 12 Others thought in terms of periodization, with 1683 giving “impulse” to Vienna's new place in Europe. Since the victory on 12 September, the city “had ceased to be a German border fortress [Grenzfestung] against the onslaught of Asian barbarism [Unkultur].” Expansion of the Habsburg realm following the battle offered Vienna entry into the “ranks of the Weltstädte of our continent.”Footnote 13
Public participation in and enthusiasm for the events of the 1883 Türkenwoche are hard to gauge, but the sponsoring municipal government reported the events found “the greatest appeal” among the “religious folk,” with “extraordinary participation” at events held at the St. Stephen's cathedral. Dozens of sermons were heard by “unusually large crowds.”Footnote 14 Die Bombe, a satirical newspaper, offered less reverential coverage of the events of the 1883, joking:
This week we will celebrate the jubilee for the liberation of Vienna from the Turks; if only we also knew when the jubilee for the liberation from the high meat prices would come. Signed, All non-butchers in ViennaFootnote 15
Hence, press coverage ranged from the humorous (a cartoon of a man telling his wife that she ought to put herself on display in the Turkish exhibit because planners “needed objects that look like they come from the seventeenth century”) to the earnest coverage of Emperor Francis Joseph's busy Türkenwoche itinerary. Next to an ambitious “International Electrical Exhibit” running in Vienna the same month and boasting motors, generators, and the continent's largest collection of electrical lights, the 1683 historical exhibit was the city's premier attraction.Footnote 16 It was held in the new city hall (Rathaus), a building itself consecrated on 12 September 1883. We are told that the typical visitor to the exhibit would spend two hours at the show, viewing more than 1,200 objects on display. Highlights included “exotic” tents that Turks had erected during the siege of Vienna and the alleged skull of the defeated Ottoman leader Kara Mustafa, along with the cord that had strangled him and the undergarment he was ostensibly wearing when he died. The arms of the latter were said to be sewn with seventy-two descriptions of the prophet Mohamed.Footnote 17
Throughout the festivities, various what-if scenarios circulated in the city. For Pope Leo XIII and Viennese participants alike, historical commemoration consisted, in part, in historical speculation. What if the Turks had been victorious in 1683? In a missive sent from Rome to Viennese Prince-Bishop Joseph Cölestin, the Pope wrote, “We can only imagine the consequences . . . had the enemy taken the capital city.” He invited his flock to consider the “horror” had the Gospel been destroyed and “Mohammedan superstition been spread over Europe.”Footnote 18 In Leo's speculation, the enemy had not been specifically Turk or Ottoman, but Muslim, and the victors had been a “united Christendom” under the wise council of the then-Pope Innocent XI.
Ordinary Viennese may have toyed with historical what-if questions at a more prurient level. The alleged sexual lasciviousness of Kara Mustafa was a popular theme in the commemorative plays in 1883.Footnote 19 One newspaper published a “short letter from a naïve countess” (presumably fictitious), in which the aristocratic “Melanie” confesses relief that she had not been forced to marry “a young Effendi.” Had the Turks been victorious, she would have been allowed to unveil her countenance to the “goat” only rarely as he strolled past his harem. Her “Pascha” husband would have “long since drowned me in the Danube Canal had he been a Turk.”Footnote 20 Melanie's nightmare came true on the stage in J. P. Ostland's play, Der Entsatz von Wien, in which the Mustafa character chooses sexual partners from among Christian slave women. The blonde “with eyes as blue as the sky . . . [She] shall be the first.” When Mustafa asks the blonde, one of Austria's most beautiful blossoms, what she would wish for, she answers, “Freedom.” “It shall be yours when I have loved you,” replies the menacing Turk.Footnote 21 Perhaps this speculation about a Turkish takeover brought some solace. Arguably dreadful things had happened in the very recent Austrian past—the financial markets had crashed in 1873, Prussia had delivered a defeat in 1866—but things could have been worse.
Kara Mustafa featured in most of the what-if scenarios. A rash of writers tried to get into his head, so to speak. The fact that his skull was on display at the historical exhibit may have inspired these speculations. Historian Onno Klopp asked readers to recall the devious plots hatched in this “still-grinning skull,” whereas historian/playwright Richard von Kralik presented Mustafa in the first person: “How near the prize . . . Had it succeeded, I should have transformed the world, raised myself higher ever than any man under the stars.” Having Mustafa deliver what we will call the “at the gates” soliloquy on stage was a way for Austrian writers to reinforce the notion that the saving of Vienna was, in fact, the saving of Europe.
Typical is a scene from Reinhold Edmund Hahn's 1865 play Starhemberg, oder die Bürger von Wien, in which the power-hungry Kara Mustafa comes out of his colorful tent and surveys the city of Vienna below: “[Soon] hunger will overcome the Viennese/And when I call Vienna mine, so Austria/ If Austria is Turkish, so too will be Germany/And if I have these, I'll plant myself in Rome/The golden crescent rises over Peter's rock/And the Vatican, my headquarters/Shall become my seraglio and my apartment!”Footnote 22 The bloodthirsty Mustafa inspired volumes of lurid poetry in 1883—landscapes of dead camels and horses, decapitated men, a dead woman with a still-suckling babe at her cold breastFootnote 23—and embodied “threat” more forcefully than any of the other characters in the early modern saga.
But the Turk was no longer really a threat. In fact, Mustafa had by this point slipped from historical actor to legend. None of these productions aimed to whip up fervor against the Turks of the present. In Austria, “Turk” was rhetorical shorthand for threat; and, as noted, nineteenth-century Austrians used the occasion of the jubilee to address numerous class, national, and religious threats in their midst.
Liberal Vienna “under siege”
Bigger than Mustafa's skull and more imposing than his undergarment was the structure at the heart of the 1883 commemoration: Vienna's new city hall (Rathaus). Its final stone was laid by Kaiser Francis Joseph on 12 September, marking what the liberal Neue Freie Presse called a Doppelfeier of past and future, of the imperial city's historic defense against the “wild storm of Islam” and its bright future as the center of liberty and progress. But the newspaper also emphasized that the wild storms of the present looked decidedly home-grown. Liberals in the 1880s looked with alarm at the growing socialist and Catholic political movements, suggesting that at this juncture it was “not the external but rather the internal foe besieging the city.”Footnote 24 For liberals, the Turkish festivities offered a chance to celebrate the good Viennese Bürger beating back an encroaching foe.
It had taken ten years to complete the new city hall, and at each stage, the memory of the Turks was invoked. The building sits on the Ringstrasse, the grand boulevard built on the site of the old city walls. These were precisely the walls that constituted the “gates of Western civilization” in the triumphant historiography of 1683. In the ceremonial laying of the building's foundation stone in June 1873, Kaiser Francis Joseph invoked the bulwark motif of Austria as the border of Christian Europe. Historically, defensive fortresses made of stone had protected the city, but, Francis Joseph explained, “As I authorized the demolition of the city walls, it has been my firm conviction that the most secure defense of throne, as well as country, is the love and loyalty of its citizens.” The first foundation stone offered support as strong and unshakable as Viennese loyalty and “true Bürgersinn.”Footnote 25
Ten years later when Francis Joseph returned to lay the building's final stone, the Turks were still on his mind. The Bürger of 1883, great like their forefathers, represented a “renewed harmony between the monarchical mindset and the idea of freedom.”Footnote 26 Vienna's mayor Eduard Uhl concurred, invoking the city's “historical mission as a vanguard of German culture and German spirit,”Footnote 27 whereas the German nationalist newspaper Deutsche Zeitung made the connection between Viennese citizenry and the bulwark against Islam even more explicit: “Had the citizens of this city not filled the breaches in their walls with their corpses, the victorious symbol of the crescent would long since have been planted atop the ‘bulwark of Christianity.’”Footnote 28 Two things had kept the Turks out in 1683: the bricks and mortar of the old city walls and the spirit of the people defending them. The new city hall symbolized both lines of defense.
As Carl Schorske wrote, the Gothic style chosen for the Rathaus was supposed to convey municipal autonomy. In 1861 Austria's new municipal law (Gemeindeverfassung) gave greater autonomy to the elected mayor and city government. The new city hall would evoke Vienna's “origins as a free medieval commune, now reborn after a long night of absolutist rule.”Footnote 29 Conveniently, the building happened to be sitting atop a reminder of the Turks. The Wiener Sonn- und Montags Zeitung reported that when builders began digging the unusually deep foundation for the building, they found, with help from a battlefield map from 1683, not one but two munitions depots.Footnote 30 To understand how the motif of a bulwark might have resonated with liberals, we must consider that contemporary debates about the franchise had a geographical or topographical component; restricting the male franchise meant “keeping out” the lower middle and working classes that by and large lived in Vienna's outlying districts.
Although speeches at the consecration of the city hall highlighted the valor of the citizenry of 1683, the very makeup of the Bürgerschaft of 1883 Vienna was in flux. The number of enfranchised men had grown from 27,098 in 1869 to 49,014 in 1888. Two years after the Rathaus opened, the so-called five-gulden men of the lower middle class gained the right to vote in municipal elections.Footnote 31 The questions of who constituted the citizenry and to whom the city belonged resonated in the stories Viennese told about 1683. The siege of 1683 provided artistic and dramatic material for answering these questions. With a little imagination and updating, Franz Geffel's siege painting from the year 1689 could represent the battle in which liberals now saw themselves. This painting, now at the Vienna History Museum, was on display in the historical exhibit of 1883. In it, fortress Vienna sits apart, protected by walls, but vulnerable to the hordes of Turks clamoring in the hills. By 1883, the physical walls had been torn down, and the cleared space between the hills and the inner city now housed Vienna's lower classes. Hence, the alarm from the Neue Freie Presse that the foe was already “within.”
One of the enduring legends of 1683 was that material shortages inside the city during the siege had turned Viennese class and status hierarchies topsy-turvy, creating dramatic confusion about who was “in” and who was “out.” Richard von Kralik's Die Türken vor Wien depicts this struggle over belonging in besieged Vienna. He presents a confrontation between a “citizen” and a “farmer” at the city gates in 1683. By substituting “worker” for “farmer,” audiences may have recognized their own struggles in those of their mythologized forefathers. In the play, the citizen and farmer meet. The citizen, thinking the countryside a safer refuge, declares, “I want out of the city.” The farmer, seeking protection of the city walls replies, “And I want in.” Incensed by the farmer's misplaced sense of entitlement, the citizen demands, “You think the city belongs to you?” He continues, “You'll learn to obey the bailiff, farmer!” “The time for obeying and commanding is now over,” the farmer responds.Footnote 32
Outside the theater, worker unrest in Vienna did not halt in honor of the Türkenwoche. In the week before 12 September, a series of arson fires had been set. “Fantastic rumors are spreading about the possible culprits . . . and about the nature of the unseen enemy,” reported the Neue Freie Presse. The paper urged closer police surveillance of socialist and anarchist circles.Footnote 33 Days before the Rathaus ceremony, a 26-year-old carpenter's assistant Hedwiczek from Bohemia was arrested for singing loudly on the street. He admitted he had come from a worker's demonstration in an outlying district.Footnote 34 Eight others were also arrested for taking part in the actions, including Franz Horak, the secretary of the Slavic workers' vocational association “Slovan.” With the culprits at large, the arson fires made good fodder for journalists of various stripes tracking the unseen threats in the capital city on the eve of the Türkenwoche.Footnote 35
These demonstrations and fires were hardly the stuff of heroic legend, hardly worthy of the forefathers, who two hundred years prior had been a “shining paragon of patriotism and valor” in battle against the Turks.Footnote 36 Or had they? The most controversial historian in 1880s polemics about 1683 was one Onno Klopp. His Das Jahr 1683 und der folgende große Türkenkrieg sparked truly furious debate among reviewers, in part because he dared to impugn the behavior of the Viennese citizenry during the siege. In Klopp's telling, some citizens had fled the city; others were slow to man assigned positions at the walls. Most scandalously, “a certain party in Vienna” had planned to surrender and had begun surreptitious negotiations with Kara Mustafa. The anti-Klopp response was rapid. Footnote 37 Klopp stood accused of “depicting the behavior of the Vienna city council and the population during the Turkish siege in an invidious light and of malevolently insinuating that the city council . . . toyed with surrendering the city to the Turks.”Footnote 38 The German nationalist Deutsche Zeitung railed against the historian Klopp. “The unthinkable has happened. Shortly before the commemorative ceremony . . . a biased book appeared which undertook methodically the agenda of disparaging the reputation of the Bürger of Vienna” in the defense of their city.Footnote 39
The Klopp affair dominates much of the 1883 jubilee literature. Beyond questioning the bravery or treachery of Viennese citizens, Klopp raised two larger interpretive questions: was 1683 a local Viennese story, or did it belong to Europe? And which nations could lay claim to having saved “Western civilization?” So heated were the competing nationalist (German/Slavic) and religious (Catholic/secular) claims on 1683 that at times the Turks faded into the jubilee background altogether.
Germandom “under siege”
Not far beneath the lofty speeches and pomp of the Rathaus ceremony of 12 September 1883 was the issue that plagued the late Habsburg state: national strife. In 1883, nationalists eagerly took up the question of who, precisely, deserved most credit for “saving” Vienna in 1683. Many Viennese writers noted incredulously that the Poles were trying to upstage the Viennese celebrations with similar festivities in Cracow honoring Polish King Jan Sobieski.Footnote 40 Sobieski had led the united Christian forces in the decisive battle on 12 September, and German nationalists in particular were irritated at the prominence accorded him. At a commemorative ceremony atop the Kahlenberg, the mayor of Vienna had unveiled a memorial stone bearing a “shiny inscription” of Sobieski's name. “His name,” the Deutsche Zeitung lamented, “shines over the list of the heroic German princes who, alongside him, threw themselves against Kara Mustafa's hordes.”Footnote 41 Not audacious enough to assault directly the reputation of the revered Polish king, nationalist journalists took a jab at his progeny. Tracing a genealogy of the Sobieski clan, the Deutsche Zeitung concluded that the “daughter of the last Sobieski” had learned a trade and lived in “modest but quite happy circumstances in a suburb of Cologne.”Footnote 42
German writers who could not impugn Sobieski's military contribution to the Austrian victory could still question his motives. They used Sobieski's own letters as evidence that Poles were motivated by greed rather than by selfless love of fatherland. Days after 12 September 1683, Sobieski had written to his wife of the tremendous war booty he had collected, including 600 sacks of coins, diamond-studded belts, clocks, carpets, quivers with pearls and sapphires, not to mention 15,000 tents, 10,000 oxen, 5,000 camels, and 10,000 sheep. In the hands of German nationalists, the letter proved “that the Poles preferred to seize the opulent booty, while for their more distinguished accomplishments the imperial troops, princes, and people reaped only honor.”Footnote 43 German writers also distinguished the treacherous “Poles of today” from their heroic ancestors; securing wide autonomy for Galicia by the 1870s, Poles had “proudly turned their backs on the imperial capital.”Footnote 44 Even symbolically the Poles were not doing their part for Austria in 1883; several articles criticized Poles for not contributing material artifacts to the Viennese exhibit and for displaying Sobieski's booty at the rival historical exhibit in Cracow. Prince Konstantin Czartoryski, the vice president of the Herrenhaus, committed another Slavic slight by declining an invitation to the Rathaus celebrations, allegedly with the explanation that “his place at the jubilee was in Cracow, not in Vienna!”Footnote 45 Das Vaterland imagined the Cracow commemoration as a Slavic orgy: Poles, Bohemians, Croatians, Slovenians, and Ruthenians were gathering to take credit for “the Turkish deed.”Footnote 46
The absence of a Slavic presence at the opening of the Rathaus caused unease and prompted the Neue Freie Presse to reflect on Vienna's place in the monarchy. The paper raised a question perhaps on the minds of its readers: Was Vienna losing the status it had established in 1683? The reassuring answer was “no.” “We don't believe it. Were it thinkable that Austria should become atomized, the attraction of Vienna would pull the pieces back together again . . . Vienna is the tent pole of the monarchy.”Footnote 47 The Türkenwoche offered fertile ground for fighting contemporary national battles under the cover of “history.” The troops who fought the Turks in 1683 had formed a “multi-national” coalition, although the “nationness” of these actors was not in the foreground at the time. They included imperial Habsburg troops, Bavarians, Swabians, Franconians, Saxons, and of course Sobieski's Poles. In the commemorations of 1883, the national character of the participants was magnified, if not invented, turning 1683 into a staging ground for present-day battles within the Austrian state.
Catholic Worldview “under siege”
In the Cracow-Vienna feud, we see the shadow of provinciality hanging over the Türkenwoche. It returns us to the question of what was being celebrated on 12 September. Was it a Viennese triumph? A victory for Germandom? For Habsburgs? For Europe? Onno Klopp, the protagonist in the 1883 Historikerstreit, rejected a parochial national position and claimed that the historical actors at the time were well aware that “the main character trait” of their actions was Christian. Klopp's general critique of 1683 historiography was that it told a local, rather than a universal, story. Narrow-minded Viennese and their historians were at once “limited and also hubristic” in claiming 12 September as their own. “The day is simultaneously a great one for the Poles, Bavarians, Saxons, Franks, Swabians, for all lands whose forefathers took part in the relief of Vienna.”Footnote 48 The German nationalist Deutsche Zeitung attacked Klopp as a “so-called friend of Austria” and fingered him as a member of a dark, suspect “clerical-particularist party” in Germany.
In 1883, the Catholic clergy would spin a universal siege story that more resembled Klopp's version than that of German nationalists. Pope Leo characterized the defeat of the Turks as a triumph of early modern cooperation between state and church, which, according to Prince-Bishop Cölestin of Vienna, had decided “the destiny of the entire Christian occident.”Footnote 49 Church officials confidently wrote 1683 as grand narrative. Through providence God had made Austria great and powerful:
Under the paternal rule of its pious, noble, Christian emperor Austria [was allowed to] blossom ever more magnificently, to develop itself powerfully and mightily for the supreme task assigned to it by providence. At a time determined by God, [Austria] was to carry Christian culture and Bildung—through which the peoples of Europe now stand at the apex of humanity, towering above the non-Christian peoples of the globe—to the liberated Orient, reclaimed for Christendom.Footnote 50
Such universal accounts of Austria's mission within Europe and beyond could be put to two uses. First, they could inspire Catholic listeners to fight the “Turks” of their day, i.e., the enemies of Christian culture in the present. Second, they provided Catholics a way to combat a scientific materialism creeping into historical writing itself.
Catholic accounts of 1683 portrayed God as primary historical agent. In a sermon on the evening of 7 September 1883, Father Gundisalv Feldner made the requisite references to the inhuman, animalistic behavior of Turkish fighters in 1683 and the poor, enslaved condition of all peoples who had not yet succeeded in liberating themselves from the Turkish yoke. But then, in a move reminiscent of Fichte's “Speeches to the German Nation,” Feldner switched to the present, addressing his audience as the “descendants of these heroic Christians” and urged them to recognize “that the heroic blood of the defenders of Vienna still courses through our veins.” Defenders need offenders, and Feldner warned that there were now enemies in the midst—“enemies within and without”—who needed to be combated through prayer.Footnote 51
Feldner was likely alluding to socialists or Jews, who in Catholic Viennese politics were fluidly bundled into one. He alluded to an enemy worldview that his colleague, Father Max Klinkowström, would identify more clearly in a sermon several nights later. Published as “God—The Savior of Vienna 1683,” Klinkowström's sermon also focused on God as historical agent. To the list of worldly heroes being celebrated during the Türkenwoche (Sobieski, Emperor Leopold, Karl von Lothringen, Rüdiger von Starhemberg, Mayor Liebenberg, and the monk Marco d'Aviano), he insisted on adding the divine. “In this age of science some things cannot be explained mechanically. We must appreciate the wonder of God.”Footnote 52 He continued that we tend to interpret “certain facts based on only the natural forces that have made themselves visible.” But one must acknowledge that for man, left to his own devices, “such massive successes would not have been possible without God's special foreordination and leadership, [his] assistance and protection.”Footnote 53 To Klinkowström's regret, secular historians in 1883 were becoming far more interested in the roles of the “common people” during the siege than they were in their divine guide.
One such figure, mentioned above, was the historian commissioned by the city government to write an “objective” account of 1683. With Rankean devotion, historian Victor von Renner set out to lay clear the story of 1683 “as it had actually been.” Given a year's leave from teaching, Renner combed archives “without rose-colored glasses, but also without all the spite and bias” presumably marring all previous accounts. Only an unbiased account could be “truly patriotic,” the real Lehrmeisterin of humanity.Footnote 54 Devoted to history as science, Renner pursued the noble dream, “to research the historical truth, unconcerned with the currents of the day.” In his estimation, neither Gottfried Uhlich's 1783 centennial history of the siege nor the best-selling Camesina had vetted the archives with the diligence of the scientist.Footnote 55
Renner was confident that scientific objectivity would allow him to undo “myths” that had grown around the siege. Science would by necessity destroy some of the “beloved beliefs” and the aforementioned “empire of legends” that had grown around 1683. Not the historian but “the documents themselves” would bear the blame for any such demythologizing.Footnote 56 Father Klinkowström too believed that the truth of 1683 could be found in the sources and advocated rigorous archival digging. But for him the documents would prove that the historical actors themselves attributed their success to divine intervention. Speaking as the ghost of the emperor from 1683, Klinkowström wrote, “‘Read in your archives,’ speaks Emperor Leopold, ‘for you preserve my letters and there you will find that which you seek.’”Footnote 57 In other words, the historical actors would clear up questions of what they were fighting for (Christendom) and who was guiding them (God).
For the priest Klinkowström and the scientist Renner, commemoration of 1683 fit easily into a wider debate about agency, human and divine, in the writing of history in the late nineteenth century. Renner hoped his siege history would rise above the “currents of the day”; but instead it comprised one of these currents.
Whither the Bulwark?
Although many parties within Austria contributed to the jubilee literature of 1883, one group was noticeably silent on the topic of commemoration. These “Turkophile” Austrians, as they were derogatively called by critics, were more interested in commercial opportunities and freight costs between Vienna and Constantinople than in Mustafa and an eternal Turkish other. These were the patrons of Vienna's Oriental Museum—businesspeople, scholars, civil servants, and travelers. They were the readers of the Oesterreichische Monatsschrift für den Orient, a journal founded in 1875 that focused on Austrian trade and commerce with the Orient. The journal advocated the position that knowledge is power; knowing and understanding Turks of the present was far more pressing than debating the character of the early modern foe. In a ten-year retrospective published in 1885, editors summarized the journal's mission as follows: to track the economic development taking place in the Orient, to familiarize readers with the cultural mores of the Oriental peoples, to mediate the relationships between the Orient and the Occident, to broker German culture, and to spur and promote lively trade between the Orient and Austria-Hungary.Footnote 58
There is a clearly expansionist tone; these Austrians saw potential profit and even colonial possibilities not only in occupied Bosnia, but in Anatolia as well. To exploit this potential, one needed to travel to the Orient and to become a Kenner, a connoisseur of Turkish lands. For the businessperson, the first requirement for establishing lasting and fruitful trade relations with the Orient was “knowledge of the Orient itself.” Archduke Carl Ludwig, patron of the Oriental Museum, offered a yearly stipend for a “young, ambitious businessman” to establish himself in the Orient.Footnote 59 By the final two decades of the nineteenth century, Austrian “Turkophiles” had clearly adopted the language of a civilizing mission for Turkey. They still worked with the Türkenbilder that shaped much of the jubilee literature of 1883—“the Turk” might still be fanatical, uncivilized, oversexed, but he no longer posed a threat. The Ottoman menace had become an Ottoman opportunity.
The Oesterreichische Monatsschrift für den Orient's practical, business-oriented approach to Turkey and the Balkans threatened one of the master narratives of the siege of Vienna commemoration: Vienna was a bulwark of Europe, of Christianity, of the West. The Turks posed an eternal menace, regardless of their presently weak position. Speaking before a Catholic club in 1883, Johann Alexander von Helfert emphasized, “Today the Turk is as alien to European civilization as he was 500 years ago when he established himself on the Bosporus.” Helfert insisted that Christians could not do business with this Other. Fellow Austrians who sang the praises of Turks as dignified, honest, and trustworthy partners in trade ought to consult the non-Turkish peoples of the Balkans who know from experience nothing but “broken promises, perfidiousness, and violations of agreements” from the Turks. With their newly written constitutions, the Turks were opportunistic Asians in European disguise. “Everything else is merely paint and varnish, an exterior shell behind which, if you just poke around a bit, hides an Asiatic essence” eternally opposed to the European.Footnote 60
In his resistance to revising the early modern Türkenbild, Helfert draws on the same Turk who featured in the what-if scenarios of 1883. If Vienna had fallen to the Turks two hundred years ago, one newspaper reasoned, the Germanic regions of the Danube, “now among the highest-civilized regions of the world” would have suffered from Turkish mismanagement and unremitting warfare. Austria would, in short, be Bosnia.Footnote 61 In the decades leading to World War I, the “Turkophile” position gained ground; Austrian trade with and travel to the Ottoman lands increased. Many would come to challenge Helfert's “eternal siege” mentality at a time when economic opportunities in Anatolia beckoned and European competition there threatened.
Already in 1883 the Neue Freie Presse had credited the “ever-restless fantasy of the Volk” for its skill in recreating the siege story to fit the needs of its time. In the period under consideration here, contemporaries drew upon the siege, and its powerful association with threat, to give expression to the municipal, national, and religious fissures of the present. As would become apparent in 1933 and 1983, during the two hundred fiftieth and three hundreth anniversaries of 1683 in Vienna, “the empire of legends” about the siege did not die. In both popular celebrations and historiographical literature, the legends were retold, revised, rebuked, and reinvented. In them, remembering “Turks” remained a vehicle for articulating competing views of Austrianness.
Strikingly, jubilees of the victory over the Turks have rarely had a celebratory air. They are downbeat affairs, occasions to remind a wider public of a need for vigilance against a perceived threat of the day. Despite the plays and festivities staged by the city government, a grim mood hung over the Türkenwoche of 1883. The Neue Freie Presse catalogued the woes of the city of Vienna, the weakened German position within the empire, the economic standing of the state vis-à-vis international competitors, and other issues that “fill[ed] the Viennese with worry for their city.”Footnote 62 These explained the absence of “a joyous, happy mood” at the commemoration of Austria's greatest triumph.
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In his 1883 play Die Türken vor Wien, Richard von Kralik, the Catholic writer and later doyen of Christian Socialism, recounts the story of the 1683 siege of Vienna. Habsburg military heroes, ordinary Viennese Bürger, and the Ottoman grand vizier Kara Mustafa appear on stage in Kralik's retelling of what had become a foundational moment in Austrian historiography. The defeat of the Turks at Vienna in 1683 has been hailed as Austria's finest hour, the Habsburgs' greatest service to Europe, and as the moment when Austria defended all of Western civilization from, among other things, the East, Asian barbarism, and Muslim infidels. Kralik may be the playwright here; but in a preface to the play, he introduces the two figures who are the true sources for his tale of 1683: Lady History and Lady Legend. They work together, each playing her part. Lady History and Lady Legend, he explains, sing in beautiful duet, “both accurate and truthful, neither lying nor inventing.”Footnote 2 Kralik's juxtaposition of history and legend was astute. Any historian looking back to the events of 1683 and the stories that have since accumulated about Austria's “saving the occident” encounters a multi-century work in progress, a story under revision, a tale in which “legends” about coffee (said to be introduced to Europe by Turks fleeing Vienna) and croissants (a bun shaped, suspiciously, like a crescent) persist alongside themes more properly in the domain of “history”: class tensions, national conflict, and church-state relations.Footnote 3
Kralik was writing in the midst of a publishing boom that coincided with the two hundredth anniversary of the siege of Vienna. His play was among sixty-five new titles in the category Jubiläums-literatur published between 1882–1884.Footnote 4 Unlike Kralik, some believed that it was possible (and necessary) to untangle history and legend in the literature on 1683. Victor von Renner, the historian commissioned by the city of Vienna in 1883 to write an objective history of the siege using the “scrutinizing eye of the researcher,” seemed somewhat daunted by the works that had come before him. He observed, “With the books that depict the history of the second siege of Vienna one could fill a library.”Footnote 5 This did not stop Renner himself from publishing another 487 pages on the subject. His scientific account would, he claimed, correct for the “empire of legends” that had grown around this early modern Habsburg triumph. For playwrights, historians, essayists, politicians, and the many journalists whose writings constituted the jubilee literature, the bicentennial of the siege offered an opportunity—or even a mandate—to reflect on the past and to “remember” and “commemorate” victory over the Turks.
Nineteenth-century authors writing about the Turks found a ready readership, and historian Albert Camesina hinted at why this might be so. He observed that 1683 “still lay deep under the ‘level of consciousness’ of the present.”Footnote 6 His best-selling book, Wiens Bedrängnis im Jahre 1683, was written twenty years before the bicentennial and reportedly found a wide audience even among nonacademic readers. The work “had such an appeal among the public that the edition was soon out of stock and copies were selling in the antiquarian market for more than double the original price.”Footnote 7 Camesina's claim that 1683 was still lurking beneath the Austrian present warrants investigation. He raises for us the possibility that public hunger for the Turks was not “really” about Turks at all, nor even about the past. Not surprisingly, reading Kralik, Renner, Camesina and their contemporaries on “the Turks” reveals far more about late-nineteenth-century Austrians, their universe of perceived threats, than it does about the combatants of 1683.
In 1883, playwright J. P. Ostland noted something that recent scholarship on historical commemoration has made abundantly clear: commemoration is the present packaged as the past.Footnote 8 Ostland wrote that Austria of his day was in a kind of a jubilee fever. “We live in a time when jubilees have not only come into fashion, they will also be exploited in every conceivable way.”Footnote 9 To what present purpose could the Turks be exploited 200 years after the siege? What function did the preoccupation with “the Turks” serve at a time when Turks and the Ottoman Empire they ruled had ceased to pose a genuine military threat to Habsburg Central Europe? This essay contends that for late-nineteenth-century Austria, Turks had come to stand in for a more generalized sense of threat. They reappeared year in and year out as the archetypal foe in the Austrian historical imagination because they were, quite simply, rhetorically useful. At various times Austrians have used the idea of an external foe to articulate competing visions of Austrianness. If we analyze the references to the historical Turkish enemy, we find in the bicentennial literature a number of perceived class, national, and religious foes of 1883.
This essay will first describe the events of the 1883 Türkenwoche, a series of events scheduled around the historically significant date of 12 September. It will then explore four internal conflicts that were bubbling below the ostensible commemoration of victory over Turks. First, liberals in power in Vienna's municipal government in the 1880s worried about threats to the Bürgerschaft from below, from a nascent workers' movement and from lower-middle-class “five-gulden men” demanding the franchise. The idea of a city under siege (1683) mapped nicely onto liberals' fears of the lower classes who lived, by and large, in Vienna's outlying districts. Second, German nationalists used the Turkish anniversary to warn against creeping Slavic autonomy within Austria. They took aim at Poles who in 1883 were busy celebrating Polish King Jan Sobieski's role in 1683 and making the same claims about saving all of Christendom that German nationalists wanted for their own. Third, Austrian Catholics used the Türkenwoche to draw reference to dangerous forces of scientific materialism in late-nineteenth-century history writing. And finally, disagreement arose about whether the experiences of 1683 should guide Austrian-Ottoman relations in the present. Catholic orators saw in 1683 an important defensive lesson for the present and future and pushed for an eternal vigilance against Turks in whatever guise. They warned against establishing increased business contacts with the Orient, worried that business-oriented “Turkophiles” had forgotten the lessons of 1683 and were carelessly opening Europe to Mohammedism through trade.
All parties in 1883 using 1683 for rhetorical purposes enlisted Lady History and Lady Legend to varying degrees. They drew on shifting Austrian and European stereotypes of Turks that had evolved over centuries. These include the Turk as infidel Asian barbarian, the nemesis of all that was “the West,” and the Turk as sexually depraved despot.Footnote 10 While some nineteenth-century Orientalist scholars in Austria had argued that Turks, and Muslims more generally, could and should be studied with a scientific detachment, the commemorative discourse of 1883 drew primarily on an older Turk: threatening and dangerous.
12 September and the Türkenwoche 1883
In September 1883, Vienna hosted the Türkenwoche, a week-long series of masses, speeches, processions, theater productions, and an historical exhibit that drew large crowds and brought in the imperial family and Catholic hierarchy from around the Habsburg Empire. Two hundred years earlier, after a siege lasting months, the Turks had been defeated at the Kahlenberg, overlooking Vienna. The date of the battle was 12 September 1683, and its significance was asserted immediately. Pope Innocent XI moved to merge celebration of Mary's birth (8 September) with the commemoration of Kahlenberg four days later. Until the year 1783, when Emperor Joseph II declared an end to the ritual, the blessed victory of 12 September was commemorated in yearly processions.Footnote 11 Planners of the bicentennial envisioned a full week of festivities, and if we include the month-long historical exhibit of Turkish artifacts, the commemoration of victory over the Turks had stretched into a full Türkenmonat.
Precisely what was being commemorated in 1883 was open to interpretation, however. In some accounts, the date 12 September marked a decisive, discrete event. As one author remarked, two hundred years ago, on this day, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, “Christian Europe” had been liberated from “three hundred years of threat from the Muslim crescent.”Footnote 12 Others thought in terms of periodization, with 1683 giving “impulse” to Vienna's new place in Europe. Since the victory on 12 September, the city “had ceased to be a German border fortress [Grenzfestung] against the onslaught of Asian barbarism [Unkultur].” Expansion of the Habsburg realm following the battle offered Vienna entry into the “ranks of the Weltstädte of our continent.”Footnote 13
Public participation in and enthusiasm for the events of the 1883 Türkenwoche are hard to gauge, but the sponsoring municipal government reported the events found “the greatest appeal” among the “religious folk,” with “extraordinary participation” at events held at the St. Stephen's cathedral. Dozens of sermons were heard by “unusually large crowds.”Footnote 14 Die Bombe, a satirical newspaper, offered less reverential coverage of the events of the 1883, joking:
This week we will celebrate the jubilee for the liberation of Vienna from the Turks; if only we also knew when the jubilee for the liberation from the high meat prices would come. Signed, All non-butchers in ViennaFootnote 15
Hence, press coverage ranged from the humorous (a cartoon of a man telling his wife that she ought to put herself on display in the Turkish exhibit because planners “needed objects that look like they come from the seventeenth century”) to the earnest coverage of Emperor Francis Joseph's busy Türkenwoche itinerary. Next to an ambitious “International Electrical Exhibit” running in Vienna the same month and boasting motors, generators, and the continent's largest collection of electrical lights, the 1683 historical exhibit was the city's premier attraction.Footnote 16 It was held in the new city hall (Rathaus), a building itself consecrated on 12 September 1883. We are told that the typical visitor to the exhibit would spend two hours at the show, viewing more than 1,200 objects on display. Highlights included “exotic” tents that Turks had erected during the siege of Vienna and the alleged skull of the defeated Ottoman leader Kara Mustafa, along with the cord that had strangled him and the undergarment he was ostensibly wearing when he died. The arms of the latter were said to be sewn with seventy-two descriptions of the prophet Mohamed.Footnote 17
Throughout the festivities, various what-if scenarios circulated in the city. For Pope Leo XIII and Viennese participants alike, historical commemoration consisted, in part, in historical speculation. What if the Turks had been victorious in 1683? In a missive sent from Rome to Viennese Prince-Bishop Joseph Cölestin, the Pope wrote, “We can only imagine the consequences . . . had the enemy taken the capital city.” He invited his flock to consider the “horror” had the Gospel been destroyed and “Mohammedan superstition been spread over Europe.”Footnote 18 In Leo's speculation, the enemy had not been specifically Turk or Ottoman, but Muslim, and the victors had been a “united Christendom” under the wise council of the then-Pope Innocent XI.
Ordinary Viennese may have toyed with historical what-if questions at a more prurient level. The alleged sexual lasciviousness of Kara Mustafa was a popular theme in the commemorative plays in 1883.Footnote 19 One newspaper published a “short letter from a naïve countess” (presumably fictitious), in which the aristocratic “Melanie” confesses relief that she had not been forced to marry “a young Effendi.” Had the Turks been victorious, she would have been allowed to unveil her countenance to the “goat” only rarely as he strolled past his harem. Her “Pascha” husband would have “long since drowned me in the Danube Canal had he been a Turk.”Footnote 20 Melanie's nightmare came true on the stage in J. P. Ostland's play, Der Entsatz von Wien, in which the Mustafa character chooses sexual partners from among Christian slave women. The blonde “with eyes as blue as the sky . . . [She] shall be the first.” When Mustafa asks the blonde, one of Austria's most beautiful blossoms, what she would wish for, she answers, “Freedom.” “It shall be yours when I have loved you,” replies the menacing Turk.Footnote 21 Perhaps this speculation about a Turkish takeover brought some solace. Arguably dreadful things had happened in the very recent Austrian past—the financial markets had crashed in 1873, Prussia had delivered a defeat in 1866—but things could have been worse.
Kara Mustafa featured in most of the what-if scenarios. A rash of writers tried to get into his head, so to speak. The fact that his skull was on display at the historical exhibit may have inspired these speculations. Historian Onno Klopp asked readers to recall the devious plots hatched in this “still-grinning skull,” whereas historian/playwright Richard von Kralik presented Mustafa in the first person: “How near the prize . . . Had it succeeded, I should have transformed the world, raised myself higher ever than any man under the stars.” Having Mustafa deliver what we will call the “at the gates” soliloquy on stage was a way for Austrian writers to reinforce the notion that the saving of Vienna was, in fact, the saving of Europe.
Typical is a scene from Reinhold Edmund Hahn's 1865 play Starhemberg, oder die Bürger von Wien, in which the power-hungry Kara Mustafa comes out of his colorful tent and surveys the city of Vienna below: “[Soon] hunger will overcome the Viennese/And when I call Vienna mine, so Austria/ If Austria is Turkish, so too will be Germany/And if I have these, I'll plant myself in Rome/The golden crescent rises over Peter's rock/And the Vatican, my headquarters/Shall become my seraglio and my apartment!”Footnote 22 The bloodthirsty Mustafa inspired volumes of lurid poetry in 1883—landscapes of dead camels and horses, decapitated men, a dead woman with a still-suckling babe at her cold breastFootnote 23—and embodied “threat” more forcefully than any of the other characters in the early modern saga.
But the Turk was no longer really a threat. In fact, Mustafa had by this point slipped from historical actor to legend. None of these productions aimed to whip up fervor against the Turks of the present. In Austria, “Turk” was rhetorical shorthand for threat; and, as noted, nineteenth-century Austrians used the occasion of the jubilee to address numerous class, national, and religious threats in their midst.
Liberal Vienna “under siege”
Bigger than Mustafa's skull and more imposing than his undergarment was the structure at the heart of the 1883 commemoration: Vienna's new city hall (Rathaus). Its final stone was laid by Kaiser Francis Joseph on 12 September, marking what the liberal Neue Freie Presse called a Doppelfeier of past and future, of the imperial city's historic defense against the “wild storm of Islam” and its bright future as the center of liberty and progress. But the newspaper also emphasized that the wild storms of the present looked decidedly home-grown. Liberals in the 1880s looked with alarm at the growing socialist and Catholic political movements, suggesting that at this juncture it was “not the external but rather the internal foe besieging the city.”Footnote 24 For liberals, the Turkish festivities offered a chance to celebrate the good Viennese Bürger beating back an encroaching foe.
It had taken ten years to complete the new city hall, and at each stage, the memory of the Turks was invoked. The building sits on the Ringstrasse, the grand boulevard built on the site of the old city walls. These were precisely the walls that constituted the “gates of Western civilization” in the triumphant historiography of 1683. In the ceremonial laying of the building's foundation stone in June 1873, Kaiser Francis Joseph invoked the bulwark motif of Austria as the border of Christian Europe. Historically, defensive fortresses made of stone had protected the city, but, Francis Joseph explained, “As I authorized the demolition of the city walls, it has been my firm conviction that the most secure defense of throne, as well as country, is the love and loyalty of its citizens.” The first foundation stone offered support as strong and unshakable as Viennese loyalty and “true Bürgersinn.”Footnote 25
Ten years later when Francis Joseph returned to lay the building's final stone, the Turks were still on his mind. The Bürger of 1883, great like their forefathers, represented a “renewed harmony between the monarchical mindset and the idea of freedom.”Footnote 26 Vienna's mayor Eduard Uhl concurred, invoking the city's “historical mission as a vanguard of German culture and German spirit,”Footnote 27 whereas the German nationalist newspaper Deutsche Zeitung made the connection between Viennese citizenry and the bulwark against Islam even more explicit: “Had the citizens of this city not filled the breaches in their walls with their corpses, the victorious symbol of the crescent would long since have been planted atop the ‘bulwark of Christianity.’”Footnote 28 Two things had kept the Turks out in 1683: the bricks and mortar of the old city walls and the spirit of the people defending them. The new city hall symbolized both lines of defense.
As Carl Schorske wrote, the Gothic style chosen for the Rathaus was supposed to convey municipal autonomy. In 1861 Austria's new municipal law (Gemeindeverfassung) gave greater autonomy to the elected mayor and city government. The new city hall would evoke Vienna's “origins as a free medieval commune, now reborn after a long night of absolutist rule.”Footnote 29 Conveniently, the building happened to be sitting atop a reminder of the Turks. The Wiener Sonn- und Montags Zeitung reported that when builders began digging the unusually deep foundation for the building, they found, with help from a battlefield map from 1683, not one but two munitions depots.Footnote 30 To understand how the motif of a bulwark might have resonated with liberals, we must consider that contemporary debates about the franchise had a geographical or topographical component; restricting the male franchise meant “keeping out” the lower middle and working classes that by and large lived in Vienna's outlying districts.
Although speeches at the consecration of the city hall highlighted the valor of the citizenry of 1683, the very makeup of the Bürgerschaft of 1883 Vienna was in flux. The number of enfranchised men had grown from 27,098 in 1869 to 49,014 in 1888. Two years after the Rathaus opened, the so-called five-gulden men of the lower middle class gained the right to vote in municipal elections.Footnote 31 The questions of who constituted the citizenry and to whom the city belonged resonated in the stories Viennese told about 1683. The siege of 1683 provided artistic and dramatic material for answering these questions. With a little imagination and updating, Franz Geffel's siege painting from the year 1689 could represent the battle in which liberals now saw themselves. This painting, now at the Vienna History Museum, was on display in the historical exhibit of 1883. In it, fortress Vienna sits apart, protected by walls, but vulnerable to the hordes of Turks clamoring in the hills. By 1883, the physical walls had been torn down, and the cleared space between the hills and the inner city now housed Vienna's lower classes. Hence, the alarm from the Neue Freie Presse that the foe was already “within.”
One of the enduring legends of 1683 was that material shortages inside the city during the siege had turned Viennese class and status hierarchies topsy-turvy, creating dramatic confusion about who was “in” and who was “out.” Richard von Kralik's Die Türken vor Wien depicts this struggle over belonging in besieged Vienna. He presents a confrontation between a “citizen” and a “farmer” at the city gates in 1683. By substituting “worker” for “farmer,” audiences may have recognized their own struggles in those of their mythologized forefathers. In the play, the citizen and farmer meet. The citizen, thinking the countryside a safer refuge, declares, “I want out of the city.” The farmer, seeking protection of the city walls replies, “And I want in.” Incensed by the farmer's misplaced sense of entitlement, the citizen demands, “You think the city belongs to you?” He continues, “You'll learn to obey the bailiff, farmer!” “The time for obeying and commanding is now over,” the farmer responds.Footnote 32
Outside the theater, worker unrest in Vienna did not halt in honor of the Türkenwoche. In the week before 12 September, a series of arson fires had been set. “Fantastic rumors are spreading about the possible culprits . . . and about the nature of the unseen enemy,” reported the Neue Freie Presse. The paper urged closer police surveillance of socialist and anarchist circles.Footnote 33 Days before the Rathaus ceremony, a 26-year-old carpenter's assistant Hedwiczek from Bohemia was arrested for singing loudly on the street. He admitted he had come from a worker's demonstration in an outlying district.Footnote 34 Eight others were also arrested for taking part in the actions, including Franz Horak, the secretary of the Slavic workers' vocational association “Slovan.” With the culprits at large, the arson fires made good fodder for journalists of various stripes tracking the unseen threats in the capital city on the eve of the Türkenwoche.Footnote 35
These demonstrations and fires were hardly the stuff of heroic legend, hardly worthy of the forefathers, who two hundred years prior had been a “shining paragon of patriotism and valor” in battle against the Turks.Footnote 36 Or had they? The most controversial historian in 1880s polemics about 1683 was one Onno Klopp. His Das Jahr 1683 und der folgende große Türkenkrieg sparked truly furious debate among reviewers, in part because he dared to impugn the behavior of the Viennese citizenry during the siege. In Klopp's telling, some citizens had fled the city; others were slow to man assigned positions at the walls. Most scandalously, “a certain party in Vienna” had planned to surrender and had begun surreptitious negotiations with Kara Mustafa. The anti-Klopp response was rapid. Footnote 37 Klopp stood accused of “depicting the behavior of the Vienna city council and the population during the Turkish siege in an invidious light and of malevolently insinuating that the city council . . . toyed with surrendering the city to the Turks.”Footnote 38 The German nationalist Deutsche Zeitung railed against the historian Klopp. “The unthinkable has happened. Shortly before the commemorative ceremony . . . a biased book appeared which undertook methodically the agenda of disparaging the reputation of the Bürger of Vienna” in the defense of their city.Footnote 39
The Klopp affair dominates much of the 1883 jubilee literature. Beyond questioning the bravery or treachery of Viennese citizens, Klopp raised two larger interpretive questions: was 1683 a local Viennese story, or did it belong to Europe? And which nations could lay claim to having saved “Western civilization?” So heated were the competing nationalist (German/Slavic) and religious (Catholic/secular) claims on 1683 that at times the Turks faded into the jubilee background altogether.
Germandom “under siege”
Not far beneath the lofty speeches and pomp of the Rathaus ceremony of 12 September 1883 was the issue that plagued the late Habsburg state: national strife. In 1883, nationalists eagerly took up the question of who, precisely, deserved most credit for “saving” Vienna in 1683. Many Viennese writers noted incredulously that the Poles were trying to upstage the Viennese celebrations with similar festivities in Cracow honoring Polish King Jan Sobieski.Footnote 40 Sobieski had led the united Christian forces in the decisive battle on 12 September, and German nationalists in particular were irritated at the prominence accorded him. At a commemorative ceremony atop the Kahlenberg, the mayor of Vienna had unveiled a memorial stone bearing a “shiny inscription” of Sobieski's name. “His name,” the Deutsche Zeitung lamented, “shines over the list of the heroic German princes who, alongside him, threw themselves against Kara Mustafa's hordes.”Footnote 41 Not audacious enough to assault directly the reputation of the revered Polish king, nationalist journalists took a jab at his progeny. Tracing a genealogy of the Sobieski clan, the Deutsche Zeitung concluded that the “daughter of the last Sobieski” had learned a trade and lived in “modest but quite happy circumstances in a suburb of Cologne.”Footnote 42
German writers who could not impugn Sobieski's military contribution to the Austrian victory could still question his motives. They used Sobieski's own letters as evidence that Poles were motivated by greed rather than by selfless love of fatherland. Days after 12 September 1683, Sobieski had written to his wife of the tremendous war booty he had collected, including 600 sacks of coins, diamond-studded belts, clocks, carpets, quivers with pearls and sapphires, not to mention 15,000 tents, 10,000 oxen, 5,000 camels, and 10,000 sheep. In the hands of German nationalists, the letter proved “that the Poles preferred to seize the opulent booty, while for their more distinguished accomplishments the imperial troops, princes, and people reaped only honor.”Footnote 43 German writers also distinguished the treacherous “Poles of today” from their heroic ancestors; securing wide autonomy for Galicia by the 1870s, Poles had “proudly turned their backs on the imperial capital.”Footnote 44 Even symbolically the Poles were not doing their part for Austria in 1883; several articles criticized Poles for not contributing material artifacts to the Viennese exhibit and for displaying Sobieski's booty at the rival historical exhibit in Cracow. Prince Konstantin Czartoryski, the vice president of the Herrenhaus, committed another Slavic slight by declining an invitation to the Rathaus celebrations, allegedly with the explanation that “his place at the jubilee was in Cracow, not in Vienna!”Footnote 45 Das Vaterland imagined the Cracow commemoration as a Slavic orgy: Poles, Bohemians, Croatians, Slovenians, and Ruthenians were gathering to take credit for “the Turkish deed.”Footnote 46
The absence of a Slavic presence at the opening of the Rathaus caused unease and prompted the Neue Freie Presse to reflect on Vienna's place in the monarchy. The paper raised a question perhaps on the minds of its readers: Was Vienna losing the status it had established in 1683? The reassuring answer was “no.” “We don't believe it. Were it thinkable that Austria should become atomized, the attraction of Vienna would pull the pieces back together again . . . Vienna is the tent pole of the monarchy.”Footnote 47 The Türkenwoche offered fertile ground for fighting contemporary national battles under the cover of “history.” The troops who fought the Turks in 1683 had formed a “multi-national” coalition, although the “nationness” of these actors was not in the foreground at the time. They included imperial Habsburg troops, Bavarians, Swabians, Franconians, Saxons, and of course Sobieski's Poles. In the commemorations of 1883, the national character of the participants was magnified, if not invented, turning 1683 into a staging ground for present-day battles within the Austrian state.
Catholic Worldview “under siege”
In the Cracow-Vienna feud, we see the shadow of provinciality hanging over the Türkenwoche. It returns us to the question of what was being celebrated on 12 September. Was it a Viennese triumph? A victory for Germandom? For Habsburgs? For Europe? Onno Klopp, the protagonist in the 1883 Historikerstreit, rejected a parochial national position and claimed that the historical actors at the time were well aware that “the main character trait” of their actions was Christian. Klopp's general critique of 1683 historiography was that it told a local, rather than a universal, story. Narrow-minded Viennese and their historians were at once “limited and also hubristic” in claiming 12 September as their own. “The day is simultaneously a great one for the Poles, Bavarians, Saxons, Franks, Swabians, for all lands whose forefathers took part in the relief of Vienna.”Footnote 48 The German nationalist Deutsche Zeitung attacked Klopp as a “so-called friend of Austria” and fingered him as a member of a dark, suspect “clerical-particularist party” in Germany.
In 1883, the Catholic clergy would spin a universal siege story that more resembled Klopp's version than that of German nationalists. Pope Leo characterized the defeat of the Turks as a triumph of early modern cooperation between state and church, which, according to Prince-Bishop Cölestin of Vienna, had decided “the destiny of the entire Christian occident.”Footnote 49 Church officials confidently wrote 1683 as grand narrative. Through providence God had made Austria great and powerful:
Under the paternal rule of its pious, noble, Christian emperor Austria [was allowed to] blossom ever more magnificently, to develop itself powerfully and mightily for the supreme task assigned to it by providence. At a time determined by God, [Austria] was to carry Christian culture and Bildung—through which the peoples of Europe now stand at the apex of humanity, towering above the non-Christian peoples of the globe—to the liberated Orient, reclaimed for Christendom.Footnote 50
Such universal accounts of Austria's mission within Europe and beyond could be put to two uses. First, they could inspire Catholic listeners to fight the “Turks” of their day, i.e., the enemies of Christian culture in the present. Second, they provided Catholics a way to combat a scientific materialism creeping into historical writing itself.
Catholic accounts of 1683 portrayed God as primary historical agent. In a sermon on the evening of 7 September 1883, Father Gundisalv Feldner made the requisite references to the inhuman, animalistic behavior of Turkish fighters in 1683 and the poor, enslaved condition of all peoples who had not yet succeeded in liberating themselves from the Turkish yoke. But then, in a move reminiscent of Fichte's “Speeches to the German Nation,” Feldner switched to the present, addressing his audience as the “descendants of these heroic Christians” and urged them to recognize “that the heroic blood of the defenders of Vienna still courses through our veins.” Defenders need offenders, and Feldner warned that there were now enemies in the midst—“enemies within and without”—who needed to be combated through prayer.Footnote 51
Feldner was likely alluding to socialists or Jews, who in Catholic Viennese politics were fluidly bundled into one. He alluded to an enemy worldview that his colleague, Father Max Klinkowström, would identify more clearly in a sermon several nights later. Published as “God—The Savior of Vienna 1683,” Klinkowström's sermon also focused on God as historical agent. To the list of worldly heroes being celebrated during the Türkenwoche (Sobieski, Emperor Leopold, Karl von Lothringen, Rüdiger von Starhemberg, Mayor Liebenberg, and the monk Marco d'Aviano), he insisted on adding the divine. “In this age of science some things cannot be explained mechanically. We must appreciate the wonder of God.”Footnote 52 He continued that we tend to interpret “certain facts based on only the natural forces that have made themselves visible.” But one must acknowledge that for man, left to his own devices, “such massive successes would not have been possible without God's special foreordination and leadership, [his] assistance and protection.”Footnote 53 To Klinkowström's regret, secular historians in 1883 were becoming far more interested in the roles of the “common people” during the siege than they were in their divine guide.
One such figure, mentioned above, was the historian commissioned by the city government to write an “objective” account of 1683. With Rankean devotion, historian Victor von Renner set out to lay clear the story of 1683 “as it had actually been.” Given a year's leave from teaching, Renner combed archives “without rose-colored glasses, but also without all the spite and bias” presumably marring all previous accounts. Only an unbiased account could be “truly patriotic,” the real Lehrmeisterin of humanity.Footnote 54 Devoted to history as science, Renner pursued the noble dream, “to research the historical truth, unconcerned with the currents of the day.” In his estimation, neither Gottfried Uhlich's 1783 centennial history of the siege nor the best-selling Camesina had vetted the archives with the diligence of the scientist.Footnote 55
Renner was confident that scientific objectivity would allow him to undo “myths” that had grown around the siege. Science would by necessity destroy some of the “beloved beliefs” and the aforementioned “empire of legends” that had grown around 1683. Not the historian but “the documents themselves” would bear the blame for any such demythologizing.Footnote 56 Father Klinkowström too believed that the truth of 1683 could be found in the sources and advocated rigorous archival digging. But for him the documents would prove that the historical actors themselves attributed their success to divine intervention. Speaking as the ghost of the emperor from 1683, Klinkowström wrote, “‘Read in your archives,’ speaks Emperor Leopold, ‘for you preserve my letters and there you will find that which you seek.’”Footnote 57 In other words, the historical actors would clear up questions of what they were fighting for (Christendom) and who was guiding them (God).
For the priest Klinkowström and the scientist Renner, commemoration of 1683 fit easily into a wider debate about agency, human and divine, in the writing of history in the late nineteenth century. Renner hoped his siege history would rise above the “currents of the day”; but instead it comprised one of these currents.
Whither the Bulwark?
Although many parties within Austria contributed to the jubilee literature of 1883, one group was noticeably silent on the topic of commemoration. These “Turkophile” Austrians, as they were derogatively called by critics, were more interested in commercial opportunities and freight costs between Vienna and Constantinople than in Mustafa and an eternal Turkish other. These were the patrons of Vienna's Oriental Museum—businesspeople, scholars, civil servants, and travelers. They were the readers of the Oesterreichische Monatsschrift für den Orient, a journal founded in 1875 that focused on Austrian trade and commerce with the Orient. The journal advocated the position that knowledge is power; knowing and understanding Turks of the present was far more pressing than debating the character of the early modern foe. In a ten-year retrospective published in 1885, editors summarized the journal's mission as follows: to track the economic development taking place in the Orient, to familiarize readers with the cultural mores of the Oriental peoples, to mediate the relationships between the Orient and the Occident, to broker German culture, and to spur and promote lively trade between the Orient and Austria-Hungary.Footnote 58
There is a clearly expansionist tone; these Austrians saw potential profit and even colonial possibilities not only in occupied Bosnia, but in Anatolia as well. To exploit this potential, one needed to travel to the Orient and to become a Kenner, a connoisseur of Turkish lands. For the businessperson, the first requirement for establishing lasting and fruitful trade relations with the Orient was “knowledge of the Orient itself.” Archduke Carl Ludwig, patron of the Oriental Museum, offered a yearly stipend for a “young, ambitious businessman” to establish himself in the Orient.Footnote 59 By the final two decades of the nineteenth century, Austrian “Turkophiles” had clearly adopted the language of a civilizing mission for Turkey. They still worked with the Türkenbilder that shaped much of the jubilee literature of 1883—“the Turk” might still be fanatical, uncivilized, oversexed, but he no longer posed a threat. The Ottoman menace had become an Ottoman opportunity.
The Oesterreichische Monatsschrift für den Orient's practical, business-oriented approach to Turkey and the Balkans threatened one of the master narratives of the siege of Vienna commemoration: Vienna was a bulwark of Europe, of Christianity, of the West. The Turks posed an eternal menace, regardless of their presently weak position. Speaking before a Catholic club in 1883, Johann Alexander von Helfert emphasized, “Today the Turk is as alien to European civilization as he was 500 years ago when he established himself on the Bosporus.” Helfert insisted that Christians could not do business with this Other. Fellow Austrians who sang the praises of Turks as dignified, honest, and trustworthy partners in trade ought to consult the non-Turkish peoples of the Balkans who know from experience nothing but “broken promises, perfidiousness, and violations of agreements” from the Turks. With their newly written constitutions, the Turks were opportunistic Asians in European disguise. “Everything else is merely paint and varnish, an exterior shell behind which, if you just poke around a bit, hides an Asiatic essence” eternally opposed to the European.Footnote 60
In his resistance to revising the early modern Türkenbild, Helfert draws on the same Turk who featured in the what-if scenarios of 1883. If Vienna had fallen to the Turks two hundred years ago, one newspaper reasoned, the Germanic regions of the Danube, “now among the highest-civilized regions of the world” would have suffered from Turkish mismanagement and unremitting warfare. Austria would, in short, be Bosnia.Footnote 61 In the decades leading to World War I, the “Turkophile” position gained ground; Austrian trade with and travel to the Ottoman lands increased. Many would come to challenge Helfert's “eternal siege” mentality at a time when economic opportunities in Anatolia beckoned and European competition there threatened.
Already in 1883 the Neue Freie Presse had credited the “ever-restless fantasy of the Volk” for its skill in recreating the siege story to fit the needs of its time. In the period under consideration here, contemporaries drew upon the siege, and its powerful association with threat, to give expression to the municipal, national, and religious fissures of the present. As would become apparent in 1933 and 1983, during the two hundred fiftieth and three hundreth anniversaries of 1683 in Vienna, “the empire of legends” about the siege did not die. In both popular celebrations and historiographical literature, the legends were retold, revised, rebuked, and reinvented. In them, remembering “Turks” remained a vehicle for articulating competing views of Austrianness.
Strikingly, jubilees of the victory over the Turks have rarely had a celebratory air. They are downbeat affairs, occasions to remind a wider public of a need for vigilance against a perceived threat of the day. Despite the plays and festivities staged by the city government, a grim mood hung over the Türkenwoche of 1883. The Neue Freie Presse catalogued the woes of the city of Vienna, the weakened German position within the empire, the economic standing of the state vis-à-vis international competitors, and other issues that “fill[ed] the Viennese with worry for their city.”Footnote 62 These explained the absence of “a joyous, happy mood” at the commemoration of Austria's greatest triumph.
Maureen Healy is associate professor of history at Lewis and Clark College. This essay was written with support from the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.