Eighty years ago one of the most successful, most liberal, most enlightened European empires came to a sorry end. The dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian empire left a resentful Austrian rump surrounded by rampant nation-states, each with its own version of ethnic nationalism, mostly concocted in the 19th century from various myths and legends. Vienna was a grandiose imperial capital without an empire. The reason for the end was defeat in the Great War. But the empire had become a crumbling, decadent edifice well before then. Its last years produced a wonderful generation of satirists, musicians, playwrights, dream-interpreters and dreamers of various degrees of madness, including one notoriously mediocre painter of picture postcards.
The anniversary of the collapse of Kakania (as Robert Musil called his native empire) is a good opportunity to think again about the nature of nation-states. How are they put together? What keeps them together? What is their ideal form? And what makes them dangerous? Without nationalism we would not have had democracy. But nationalism of a lethal kind has also caused the murder of millions. To trace the shape of 20th century nation-states we must return at least to the beginning of the 19th century, when many of them were formed.
When Prince Ludwig of Bavaria built Walhalla, his neo-classical temple of German unity near Regensburg on the Donau, in 1830, he had a clear idea of nationhood. For a Dutch visitor to Walhalla it is a rather troubling idea. The national heroes, enshrined in Walhalla in the classical manner as Roman busts, include the usual poets and thinkers of the German tongue: Goethe, Kant, Herder and, as a kind of postwar atonement, Albert Einstein. There are also, as you would expect, a number of German military heroes. But included too-disconcertingly for a Dutchman-are such Dutch national heroes as Admiral Tromp, Hugo Grotius and the father of the Fatherland himself, William of Orange.
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