My favorite trainwreck
Excerpts from Thunder at Twilight, for pentatonikk's benefit, before I forget.
The solemn, perpetual ball that was the Imperial court encompassed the whole town. London was other things besides the King's residence. Even in Bourbon days, Paris had been much more than a royal encampment. But Vienna meant Habsburg. Habsburg meant Vienna. Vienna and Habsburg kept inventing each other into a crowned, turreted, sunset-hued fable that floated above ordinary earth. Compared to other urban centers in Europe, Vienna had little commerce, less industry, and hardly any of th e workable grayness of common sense. Fact-ridden pursuits could not leave much of an imprint on a city with busy with the embroidery of Christendom's foremost escutcheon. Factory and counting house were dwarfed by the magnificent shadow of the Palace. Century after century of Viennese devoted themselves to the housing and feeding and staging of their suzerains' legend. (15-16)
And then there's a bit about how although the Habsburgs were known as the House of Austria and Franz Joseph was the Emperor of Austria, "Austria" didn't exist on paper except as "the lands and provinces represented in the Imperial council;" a "grandiose ghost whose radiance must not be bounded by definition."
Inside seethed a witches' sabbath of nationalisms. Here the ethnic groupes of the Empire's non-Hungarian part went at each other through their representatives. Six million Czechs attacted ten million Germans for under-financing Czech schools in Bohemia and Moravia. Fice million Galician Poles, banged desks to demand greated administrative independence. Three and a half million Ukrainians stamped feet for a Russian-language university to counteract the Poles' cultural domination. Deputies from the South Slav area contributed to the multinational brawl.
Through their representatives' throats, over a million Slovenes and three-quarters of a million Serbo-Croats shouted their grievances. German-speaking deputies split bitterly into Socialist and Conservative movements, the latter divided still further into the anti-Semitic Christian Socialist and pan-German parties. Such schisms inspired similar front lines within other ethnic fashions. Occasionally all groups joined to excoriate Hungarian politics as practiced by the sister parliament in Budapest.
It was less a legislature than a cacophony. But since it was a Viennese cacophony it shrilled and jangled with a certain flair. Polemics were delivered through clenched teeth. Yet the vitriol came with whipped-ream rhetoric: "If Your Ministerial Excellency would finally condescend to reason!" Friction ran red hot without becoming altogether raw. Instead of exploding the Empire, nationalist fury spent itself in theater. Representatives bristled so histrionically against each other that often they had little energy left to use against the Emperor's Double Eagle under whose wings they were allowed to stage their confrontation. (18-19)