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Austria Hungary Quotes

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Austria Hungary Quotes

“Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Russia began a period of rapid expansion with the aim of making the Black Sea a Russsian lake and, ultimately, gaining access to the Mediterranean. Moldavia and Wallachia were importantly situated pawns in that game, while the Western Powers manoeuvred among themselves to exlude Russia from the Balkans. They thereby found themselves propping up a decadent Ottoman Empire while at the same time espousing the values of liberalism or, more often, romantic nationalism. Ideology, usually, but not always, took second place to realpolitik. At the same time, Austria-Hungary hoped to expand south-east into the Balkans.”

“As the nineteenth century progressed, Austria-Hungary took refuge in reaction at home and adventurism abroad in an effort to contain the centrifugal forces which eventually blew it, and much of Europe, apart. Austria, and Vienna in particular, was the real home of Central-European anti-semitism. Jews wew bottom of the pile. No matter how low you sank, the Jews were still below you, along with the gypsies. At the tail-end of the nineteenth century, the Viennese politician Karl Lueger founded his power base on an anti-semitic platform. Stories of ritual murder by Jewish cabals featured regularly in the Viennese gutter press. It is no accident that Schickelgruber, the faied artist who became Hitler, should have neen the son of a petty official and have spent his ambitions at the butt end of Viennese snobbery.”

“In vielen österreichischen Einheiten sprachen Offiziere und Mannschaften unterschiedliche Sprachen. So berichtete der Stabschef des österreichischen I. Korps bei der Schlacht von Münchengrätz, dass das gemischte polnische und ukrainische 30. Regiment tapfer bis zum Einbruch der Dämmerung gekämpft habe, die Männer dann aber nicht mehr in das Lage gewesen seien, die pantomimisch erteilten Anweisungen ihrer Offiziere zu erkennen.”