Wolfram Siemann is our self-proclaimed travel guide to historic landscapes, perspectives, and personalities. His book contextualizes the life of Clemens von Metternich, restoring balance from the long-standing stereotypes propagated by historians like Heinrich von Treitschke, Viktor Bibl, and Heinrich von Srbik. For Siemann, Metternich was a “strategist and visionary.” In this masterful biography, he elucidates the “seven epochs” of this German statesman's life. He claims, rightfully, that “since the archival research of Srbik [more than ninety years ago] no comparable full-fledged biography of Metternich has appeared” (21). It has now, and it corrects many of the errors that plagued Srbik's famous two volume work. The most fundamental was that Srbik accepted “national socialist anthropology” and faulted Metternich for failing to conquer the European east for the Germans (25). Siemann also faults Srbik for his limited evaluation of the archives.
For Siemann, the overlooked archival sources are those in Metternich's library in Königswart and the Metternich family archives in the National Archives in Prague. His extensive research in those archives, as well as in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna, make Siemann's monograph the most comprehensive and up-to-date. His use of the most recent secondary literature is also impressive. He brings to our attention the massive archival research regarding Metternich and the Eastern Question by the prolific young Czech scholar, Miroslav Šedivý, as well as the new approaches to the social and artistic contexts of the Congress of Vienna by Brian Vick. No one is perfect, however. Typos in the endnotes and bibliography cite the work of John H. Gill as by John H. Hill.
Siemann is particularly apt at reminding his readers of the importance of Metternich's more than twenty years of intimate experience with wars and social revolutions. His horror of each made for his lifelong efforts for peace and stability, even at the cost of traditional legitimacies. Siemann also shows why Metternich and his generation were threatened by the words and actions of the German Burschenschaften and their European admirers between 1815 and 1848. Burschenschaft propaganda, visually presented by Siemann through pictures of their pamphlets, remind the modern reader of the realities of the threats. Like Alan Sked, in his Metternich and Austria: An Evaluation (Basingstoke, 2008), Siemann warns us that our own fears of twenty-first-century terrorism should caution us against using words like “repression” and “police state” when describing the efforts of Metternich and his fellow statemen to secure international security.
Siemann notes that Metternich's memoirs focus on the period between 1806 and 1815 and represent about two-thirds of the Austrian's text. The remaining thirty-eight years between 1815 and 1853, when Metternich commenced his memoirs, represent only about 10 percent of their focus. Metternich considered this latter period of his life less important and left it up to later historians to explain that period based upon archival sources (240). Unfortunately, Siemann follows a somewhat similar pattern in his biography: 404 of 875 pages cover 1806 to 1815 and 233 pages cover the rest of Metternich's life. Happily, however, Siemann does apportion 227 pages of his monograph to detailing Metternich's family lineage, education, and early experiences with “The Double Crisis: Empire Reich and Revolution 1789–1801” (83) to explain Metternich's lifelong efforts to avert revolution and his equally lifelong enthusiasm for all things English, including parliamentary government and English civil society. Siemann relishes explicating such seemingly contradictory attitudes.
Siemann also introduces us to Metternich “The Economist: As Social Patriarch from Imperial Count to Early Capitalist” (736). The man whom Srbik presented as a “pleasure-seeking courtier” (736) is shown by Siemann to have been a socially conscious and innovative agricultural estate manager, vintner, and early industrial iron manufacturer. Without his access to archives in Prague, Königswart, and Johannisberg, Siemann would have been unable to provide these remarkable insights. Less persuasive, though thought provoking, is his chapter on Metternich's “love life.” It is based on the Austrian's correspondence with influential women such as Wilhelmine von Sagan and Dorothea von Lieven. Some of that correspondence has been published; other pieces remain in the archives in Prague. Siemann insists that historians “must leave the moral prejudices of their own time” to understand the mentality and styles of correspondence of a period more than 200 years ago (545).
Critically recognizing the limitations of all historians’ perspectives and highlighting especially those of Heinrich von Srbik, Siemann succeeds in bringing to successful fruition his research on Metternich with his magnum opus. It will have positive lasting impact.
