THE REVERED SOVEREIGN’S DEATH was announced in the evening. The daily anxieties of the people and the press’s usual reporting on quotidian political strife temporarily evaporated on contact with the momentous royal bereavement. Though long anticipated, the loss was profound, raw.
To many it felt like a moment of overdue reckoning. As if the frail body of the elderly monarch had somehow been holding the great, ancient, long-weakening and precariously multinational state together. The world of the previous century had finally, almost imperceptibly, slipped away. Franz Joseph was dead.
The strange — sometimes absurd, sometimes lovely — world of his sprawling Austro-Hungarian state is perhaps best evoked by the writings of Joseph Roth. Indeed, the 22-year-old Roth was one of the grey-uniformed soldiers of the Imperial and Royal army lining the streets of Vienna at the end of November 1916, when the funeral procession snaked its way from the Schönbrunn Palace to the Kapuzinergruft for the emperor’s final obsequies. Writing in retrospect, twelve years later, Roth conceived of the scene as the burial of Austria-Hungary itself.
Austria-Hungary and Roth are each hard to pin down. The former was the great Dual Monarchy, a compromise (Ausgleich) reorganisation of the ancient possessions of the Austrian emperors. In 1867, Franz Joseph’s state was restructured to put the Kingdom of Hungary on a level footing with the Hapsburgs’ German-dominated Austrian heartland.
Yet even calling the non-Hungarian half
