The Hasburg Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire
For more information on Untenable: Our Fragile Preservation check out the production’s official page.
There is a peculiar afterlife to the old Habsburg dominions. Long after Austria-Hungary vanished in 1918, its legacy remains lodged in Central European folklore, conspiracy lore, and even politics. Budapest demagogues invoking the ghosts of 1848 on anniversary rallies, Viennese tourism offices selling “imperial” Schnitzel and Strauss waltzes, these disparate phenomena are all echoes of an empire that is at once mythic and mundane. As one scholar quips, the Austro-Hungarian experiment has become a sort of European Rorschach inkblot: progressives see an early EU, nationalists a foreign yoke, nostalgists a lost golden age[1][2].
Section Index
Yet beyond pleasant kitsch, Johann Strauss playing at Schönbrunn, Sisi-edition coffee, lies a darker narrative, one used by Central Europe’s far right to fuel grievance and identity politics. Viktor Orbán, for instance, has framed Hungary’s 1848 revolution as a battle “against the Habsburg Empire,” even as his government rails at Brussels and George Soros[3]. In Austria today most people scoff at such grand designs: one study found that Austrians have largely shrugged off the 1919 treaties that dismembered the empire, while Hungarians treat them as guiding myth[4]. The same survey noted bluntly: “In Austria, it had no importance” (the Treaty of St. Germain), whereas Hungarians cling to Trianon as if it were holy writ[4]. Orbán himself has exploited that “national fairy-tale” for political ends, offering “honorary citizenship” to ethnic Hungarians abroad, rehearsing rhetoric of a once-great realm split apart by foreigners[5].
It is a reminder that old empires live on in memory. On March 15, Hungary’s national holiday, flags wave for an 1848 uprising that toppled one corner of Habsburg rule[3]. In some villages people still sing the old Habsburg anthem or erect folk statues of Maria Theresa. In other corners, openDemocracy notes, “a large number of freedom fighters took refuge in the Ottoman Empire” during Habsburg wars[6], a chapter largely forgotten by romantic histories. And in the most conspiratorial fringe, absurd rumors swirl, e.g. that the former aristocracy secretly runs modern banking or that elusive “Ágoston Trefort” quotes proved a centuries-old plot to destroy Magyar pride[7][8]. As one historian tartly observes, the “Habsburg conspiracy theory” was only invented in the 1970s (born of a dubious quote in a pop-language journal)[8]. In reality, the elites who nurtured 20th‑century “Turanist” ideas were mostly Hungarians themselves, the very ministers and barons who later became Axis or Axis‑aligned collaborators[9]. But these facts often vanish in myth.
The result is a cultural collage. In Vienna, a sort of imperial kitsch prevails: corset-wearing tour guides leading straw-hat-laden visitors through palaces, vintage postcards depicting the Emperor’s New Clothes. In Prague or Bratislava, nationalist historians now flip the script, wondering aloud if Habsburg rule wasn’t so bad after all. An intrepid columnist notes that Czech attitudes have shifted: “They [the Habsburgs] did not succeed in building a federation of equal nations,” wrote Milan Kundera, yet many Czechs now see the Habsburg era as “another golden era”[10][2]. Indeed, statues of Maria Theresa and Field Marshal Radetzky have quietly re‑appeared in Prague, often backed by the Church and right-wing politicians[11]. The same report wryly observes that a new Marian Column (erected in 2020) now stands where Jan Hus’s execution was once commemorated, the very spot of 1620’s Bohemian revolt[12]. Perhaps ironically, the main debate over monuments turned out to be a sideshow; Czechs today base patriotism more on anti-communism than anti-Austria[13].
Portraits and public art also sustain these layers of myth. In Renaissance‑meets‑baroque style, the Habsburgs lived on in frescoes and canvases that survive in every old capital. Vienna’s grand halls preserve dozens of adult and child emperors in opulent dress. The collage above shows some Habsburg worthies in all their powdered wig glory, a reminder that “the Habsburg Myth” was long cultivated by artists and novelists[1]. Writers like Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, for instance, painted nostalgia for a multiethnic Viennese realm as if it were a model for Europe[1]. Even today, elements of that myth seep into journalism and scholarship: parallels are drawn between the EU’s compromises and the old dual monarchy’s patchwork federalism[1]. Yet cherry‑picking the past is easier than living it. Behind these grand images was daily reality: bureaucrats arguing over schools, peasants in old trenches, nationalist scuffles in market squares. Modern retellings often whitewash those wrinkles.
What about folklore? The empire’s end gave rise to countless legends. Families will swear by ancestral anecdotes: a great-uncle communed with Emperor Franz Joseph on a train, or a rural village secretly cheered on rebels. In Hungary there are famous myths. One patriotic legend pictures the 1741 coronation of Maria Theresa: the heroine (styled rex Hungariae, since women technically couldn’t rule) is shown begging nobles for support, and moved, they cry out “Vitam et sanguinem pro rege nostro Maria Theresia!”, “Our life and blood for our king Maria Theresa!”[14]. It is a tear-jerking scene of medieval devotion. But historians quietly note it “never took place in this form”; it’s a 19th-century fabrication meant to dramatize loyalty to the crown[15]. In truth, the ceremony was much plainer: Theresa rode a soil-covered mound to swear an oath over Hungary, but there were no impassioned cry of demos de Virgin Mary[15]. (That said, Habsburg sites still love the legendary version, it does get Hungarian schoolchildren reciting pledges.) Such myths illustrate how states recast rites as fables, binding identity to drama.
Other fables are more sinister. Conspiracies swirl around entire lines: one complaint heard among extremists is that the Habsburgs slipped quietly into modern institutions. Some believe (without evidence) that financial elites or even the European bureaucracy are “old royals” in disguise. In Hungary, far-right blogs once claimed Ágoston Trefort (a 19th-century minister) admitted writing Finno-Ugric linguistics into textbooks as a deliberate trick, allegedly to “deprive us of our own history”[7]. This accusation, however, is not supported by the record. Maria Theresa herself ordered Hungarian history taught by 1777, under her Ratio Educationis reforms[7], hardly an attempt to erase it. In fact, UNESCO reports that the crown of Hungary was kept out of ordinary use precisely to preserve its mystique; manipulating school curricula was the last thing on the Habsburgs’ minds. Indeed, historians emphasize that the so-called “Habsburg conspiracy” didn’t even exist until a journal article in 1976[8]. By contrast, many patriotic Hungarians of the 19th century were devotees of “Turanism” themselves, turning to Orientalist fantasy to define their uniqueness[9]. The modern myth, it seems, was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Nonetheless, the notion of “invisible kings” persists on the fringes. On Czech nationalist websites one finds occasional musings about secret orders of knights, or that early Communist leaders were actually Habsburg loyalists in disguise. In Austria, some reactionaries grumble about the country’s elected president, branding him “republic’s little emperor” (in jest). But real power-play is elsewhere: the only Habsburg at large these days is Otto von Habsburg (deceased, once an MEP) and the world’s oldest grandmother. The real dynasts sit in luxury or faded estates, far from power.
It’s often said that the Habsburg Empire falls in Europe’s irrelevance zone, useful enough to visit on family history tours, but in practice dead. Yet the cultural aftershock is undeniable. Schoolchildren in Vienna still learn Strauss’s waltzes and the multi-lingual folk songs from the old textbooks. Every Balkan marketplace sells a little post-1918 nostalgia keychain. And every nationalist politician somewhere will find a way to blame this onion-skin of myths for current woes. If catastrophe and war arise, the emperors take the heat by proxy.
One irony: generations of Central Europeans who share no common state now share a common memory syndrome. As a political scientist notes about Czech attitudes, “The Habsburgs are no longer seen as occupiers” but “an entity that helped Czechs culturally and economically”[2]. To older Slovaks in Slovakia or Croats in Croatia, the empire is an even blurrier shade of faded red, either a distant calamity or a necessary evil. Meanwhile, nationalist youth groups (and surprising centrist historians) have recently devoted countless thinkpiece columns to “reassessing the Habsburg legacy” and rewriting textbooks. In each capital, one finds one civic group with a crucifix rallying imperial flags, and another reprinting Szekler-Hungarian revolutionary lore.
This tangled state of memory yields a sort of dark humor. Hungarians can rail about “Germanophiles and Magyars in captivity,” while Austrians chuckle that “Emperor Karl I’s only remaining power is to haunt econ blogs.” The Emperor’s New Clothes motif repeats: in failing democracies there’s always someone who calls out the naked dictator… who happens to be long dead. Across these stories runs the same irony of a dead multinational state: old lines are drawn in new ways, and the very concept of “empire” floats like a will-o’-the-wisp.
Ultimately, what holds these myths together is rarely the past itself but the present’s appetites. Some crave a “golden empire” of order, a romantic throwback to an imagined glory that modern governments supposedly cannot give. Others need a bogeyman to blame: banks, Brussels, or even George Soros somehow become proxies for the old Habsburg court. So we get Orban grandstanding on March 15 as if 1848 were yesterday[3], and Viennese hipsters wearing Edelweiss pins in deliberate kitsch. The same worn pages of history are pored over and twisted, depending on taste: the right sees Catholic cavalry blessing flags, the left sees feudal repression.
Cultural and Mythological Layers
From high culture to low conspiracy, the Habsburg legacy proliferates in unexpected ways. Every film about royal intrigue (even The Crown-style fare) stirs public interest, even if the star of the show bears only a passing resemblance to real emperors. In folklore, lines like “Lásd kék Dunának szép vizét” (“See the fair waters of the blue Danube”) make the river sound everlasting, the Danube is indeed “blue” only by poetic license, but the image of a benevolent empire riding that river is sticky in national memory. Educational narratives are also politicized: textbooks in Hungary might briefly mention the benevolent effects of the 1867 Compromise, but in protest memoirs these are “betrayals” by complicit aristocrats[7]. In Poland and Ukraine, where the Habsburgs once held Galicia, one finds occasional fringe calls to “return the Polish crown to the Piasts” and hints that Austria never should have ceded control. These political oppositions are mostly fringe, but they’re telling: 19th‑century partitions of Poland still serve as punchlines in nationalist comedy.
The arts haven’t been immune either. Think of operettas like The Merry Widow and White Horse Inn, festive and escapist, yet set in a distinctly imperial milieu. Cinema has long had a Habsburg soundtrack: the silent movies often set tragic romances in Austrian palaces. Even video games and literature draw on the period, the enemy general might be an Archduke, the railway station a turn-of-century Vienna. Each new generation discovers the old empire anew in fiction, though usually as background scenery, like a Gothic grandparent seen out-of-focus. It is in these layers, pop culture, cartoons of chain-smoking emperors, “the barber of Seville” staged in Salzburg, that the myth is softened. The fearsome reality of frontier skirmishes, conscriptions, religious penalties is replaced by cozy images of Lederhosen and waltzes.
Central Europe and Far-Right Myths
Because Central Europe felt the Habsburg yoke most directly, it is here that far-right mythology entwines deepest. In Hungary, nationalism’s origin myth has often hinged on the empire’s downfall. The 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which cut off much of Greater Hungary, is regarded less as a post‑WWI settlement than as a national tragedy inflicted by outsiders. Every year, the far right resurrects Trianon in speeches and marches[5]. Orbán’s Hungary even granted dual citizenship to many of those “lost” populations, turning grievance into political capital. Little wonder a museum exhibit in Budapest once quoted a job ad: “Wanted: president of Greater Hungary; experience as refugee from one’s own country preferred.” (Subtext: the Magyar race endures, despite borders.)
Irony piles up: those now in charge of Hungarian education occasionally insist the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a comfortable arrangement for Magyars, while their grandparents were taught it was oppression. In fact, as sources note, a great many Hungarians, ministers, landowners, even prime ministers, were eager participants in the imperial project[9]. They were not “suppressed subjects” but shape-shifters who held up the monarchical flags of stability until nationhood erupted. In one spectacular inversion, Arcduke Joseph Francis of Austria became a patron of the very Turan Society that conspiracy buffs claim Habsburgs banned[16]. (Guess the Lords never read the minutes.) The evidence is so clear that most academic treatments now dismiss the far-right mythology as outright fabrication[7][8].
Austria’s version of all this is often quite different. There is a strand of “Habsburg nostalgia” celebrated at kitschy festivals and in travel ads. But it rarely turns into political projects. No Austrian major party seriously proposes the monarchy’s return; instead, nostalgia is channeled into heritage tourism and subtle self-pity at being the first victim of Nazism. When pollsters asked Austrians about St. Germain and Trianon, they got a shrug[4]. Most Austrians either feel blank or faint pride in having last held the imperial seat in Vienna (though they also tend to see it as the Habsburgs having “sold out” to modern democracy anyway). In short, Austria treats its imperial past as kind of a marketable cliché, whereas Hungarians treat it as destiny or damnation.
Neighboring countries have their spins too. In the Czech lands, 1918 was proclaimed an end to “300 years of darkness,” and for decades the Habsburgs were reviled as foreign occupiers[17]. But recent scholarship and political tastes have tempered this extreme narrative. Today a fair number of Czechs are willing to point out the positive legacies, from Prague’s Baroque architecture to the Czech-born Charles IV and Rudolf II, and even speak of a cultural debt to that multinational empire[18][2]. In Romania and Yugoslavia, memories of Habsburg rule were one arrow among many in anti-imperialist quivers, often downplayed when national communism demanded new heroes. After 1990, as Ukraine and Slovenia opened up, nostalgia came back into style for a bit, though again as quaint coolness more than a political blueprint.
Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina and the Myth of the Iron Queen
Among all the Habsburg figures, none casts a longer shadow than Maria Theresa (1717–1780), the 18th‑century empress who bore 16 children and presided over Enlightenment-era reforms. To some Austrian eyes she is the empire incarnate, the “peace-loving mother-figure,” a grandmotherly monarch who saved the Habsburg realms through sheer will[19]. In Vienna today her portrait still hangs in museums as though she were a blood relative: the desk of the modern president is named for her, her bed displayed at Schönbrunn Palace, and innumerable statues (and doilies) celebrate “Maria Theresia”. Official culture often emphasizes her qualities: dutiful, devout, an iron-willed matron with a regal corset. “Into the 20th century, political forces used her for their own purposes as they saw fit,” notes an Austrian historian, and her image is not above kitsch, she is “the corpulent and maternal majesty who had many children” and “also a very fierce politician”[19]. Postcards from Vienna may laugh that the empress was not “fashionable,” but rather an unlikely feminist icon (the first and only Habsburg woman ruler) in an era when crowns were men’s business.
Yet close examination shatters the saintly legend. The very empire she inherited was built on exclusion and coercion. Specialists note that Maria Theresa’s government actively resisted Enlightenment pressures: it tightened censorship, insisted on Catholic education, and kept torture alive in the courts until her death[20]. One exposé dryly calls her “not really concerned to liberate her people from ecclesiastical or feudal tutelage”[20]. Under her reign, Protestant communities were repressed and, most infamously, in 1744 Vienna expelled the entire Jewish population from Prague, about 20,000 souls uprooted overnight[21]. (Some Viennese nobles protested to the empress; she apparently sighed that Prague was too small for both Jews and her soldiers.) She patronized a harsh penal code (the Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana) that allowed “Knotenschwanz” torture chambers, chaining suspects until confessions spat out[20]. To modern eyes this can seem chillingly at odds with the sweet maternal myth.
Her historical record is thus a curio, a hybrid of feudal dogma and reluctant reform. She did modernize some institutions (abolishing torture was only done by her son Joseph II, with her backing[20]) and promoted science grudgingly. But she also insisted her children be married off to monarchs across Europe for alliance building, throwing them into Vatican negotiations and childhood drudgery, not to modern schools. She famously spoke German in court and treated Hungarian national sentiment with impatience, ordering Hungarian officials to learn German or be replaced. And yet, paradoxically, she also decreed that Hungarian history be taught in schools, the first Ratio Educationis of 1777 included local history on the curriculum[7]. This irony seems lost on mythmakers: some ultra-nationalists even accuse her of inventing a whole Turkic origin for Magyars (a version of Turanism) to confuse the masses, completely ignoring that Maria Theresa herself supported Hungarian academia and that most Hungarian elites actually funded the Turanist societies[9].
Hungarian folk narratives cast her as villain or martyr depending on need. Nationalist fables delighted to point out that the Viennese court intentionally kept Hungary underfunded and even spiked rebellions to justify punishments. In fact the first Ratiocnium in 1770s introduced Hungarian language teaching alongside German administration, hardly the erasure her myth suggests[7]. If any mythology had underpinnings, it was the Habsburgs’ own dynastic ordeal in 1740: Maria Theresa’s rise to power was not peaceful, and the 30-year-old archduchess literally had to plead with male-dominated parliaments to back her succession. This drama became a stock scene: history paintings show Theresa with babies in her arms, while nobilities pledge oaths. But as noted above, some of the grandest moments were invented after the fact[15].
Maria Theresa’s legacy is also strangely revered in the West. In her centennial celebrations she was praised as “Europe’s greatest empress” by French and German politicians who’d never lived under her rule. Today many journalists lament the empire’s end as if she personally had dissolved it, she died at least 40 years before 1918. Conspiracy-minded commentators sometimes claim her will explicitly forbade the monarchy’s end, a private codicil somehow “hidden” by traitors. That too is fiction. By 1780 she had reshaped European alliances, but the idea of Habsburgs ruling beyond that generation was already folly. (She had bet on her son Joseph succeeding as Holy Roman Emperor, and he nearly ended the ancient title in 1806.)
Irony and Dark Humor
For all the gravity with which these myths are held, one often finds grim amusement in peeling them apart. Consider a cartoon: a nationalist pundit complaining that Maria Theresa introduced compulsory “Finno‑Ugrian propaganda,” while standing on a podium draped with the Hungarian székely flag. The absurdity of scapegoating a dead woman for 21st-century problems is potent. When questioned on her ethnic policies, Orbán quipped in Parliament that if she taught history in Hungarian, he’ll eat his hat. In academia, we just point out he’d starve anyway; the empress’ hat was Austrian-style.
We might add a modern coda. In an alternate-universe twist, there are today far-right groups that explicitly daydream of a “new Habsburg confederation” stretching from Vienna to Asia Minor, complete with a throne in Budapest. (These groups have about as much chance of succeeding as Franz Joseph’s ghost does of vetoing Budapest’s budget.) Nevertheless, their slogans sound eerily familiar: “One people under God, creed, and emperor.” It’s the old last‑line-of-defense mentality, repurposed for the 21st century. The emperor, of course, never specified which century.
What emerges is this: the Habsburg empire survives in story as a Rorschach for modern angst. Each nation colors it to its fears or fantasies. In very dark moments it has been twisted into overtly conspiratorial rhetoric, blaming 18th-century archdukes for 21st-century immigrants, but in more wistful moments it turns into a “peace project” metaphor for European unity[1]. Today’s headlines occasionally feature a Catholic archbishop blessing a revived Marian Column in Prague, while next door populist lawmakers hype an alleged “Great Turkic conspiracy” stemming from Habsburg times[9][11]. The dissonance can be jarring, one wonders if anyone remembers that Emperor Franz Joseph’s only crime was being old at the wrong time.
In the end, scholars agree on one darkly comic point: the grand claims are baseless. There is no coded continuing Habsburg will; the empire’s only ongoing achievements are Vienna’s classical music and very solid castle inventories. The “Viennese snarl” that Christmas markets display herald the capitalist age, not a restoration of serfdom. And if anyone truly wanted a return of the Habsburgs, they might at least update the story by installing them at the EU Parliament, not agitating in village squares. (One suspects the archduke politicians of 1914–18 would have much preferred the comfortable insignificance of modern office to juggling decades of uprisings and insolvencies.)
Thus the very idea of “the Habsburg Empire” becomes a whimsical anachronism. It lives on as folklore, propaganda and motto, but every time one reaches for evidence, a bizarre pall falls. The Austrian historian Oliver Rathkolb observed that for Austria, those 1919 “peace” treaties are largely forgotten; for Hungary, they are the backbone of a victimhood narrative[4]. Likewise, Maria Theresa is as much Nazi-era poster child as Enlightenment reformer in some accounts. It is this malaise of memory that provides the cynic’s last laugh: an empire that died by guns and trains now continues under the pen and the film director’s lens. Nothing scares our modern world more than an idea that refuses to die, except perhaps the idea of a medieval order run by smiling bureaucrats in powdered wigs.
Also, don’t forget to check out “Untenable: Our Fragile Preservation” Behind The Screenplay page for more information on the writing inspiration and process.
