Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (3 page)

THREE
Remembering Empires

Maximilian would know that castle. He built it, and called it Miramar. He was the younger brother of Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, King of Jerusalem, Prince of Transylvania, Grand Duke of Tuscany and of Cracow, Duke of Lorraine, Lord of Trieste, and he was a sailor by profession. Not long after our encounter with him at the Obelisk he became the commander of the Austrian fleet, with his headquarters in Trieste. The story goes that caught in a storm in the bay one day he took shelter in an inlet a few miles north of the city, and so fell in love with the setting that when he married Carlotta, daughter of the King of Belgium, he built them this pretty folly on the spot.

In a way it was a little like a romantic idealization of the empire itself, a fairy-tale mock fortress on this southern shore, and when I see it out there I am reminded poignantly of the passing of all empires, those seductive illusions of permanence, those monuments of hubris which have sometimes been all evil, but have sometimes had much good to them. In particular of course I am reminded of the Pax Britannica, which has been part of my life always, in fact as in imagination, and which originally brought me to Trieste—when I first came here a Union Jack flew in the Piazza Unita and British warships often lay at the quays (“They never seem to keep still,” I heard an elderly Triestino say to his companion, one listless August day, as they watched the Royal Navy incessantly scrubbing its decks and polishing its brasswork . . . ). The city was very poor then, in the aftermath of war, and I remember still as an imperial gesture the decision of a fellow officer of mine, as we sat together in a restaurant, to send some quite large sum of money, a few million lire in the nonsensical currency of the day, to two abject beggar-boys mouthing appeals outside our window—who pranced away down the street, delirious with delight, as if they had been rewarded by the King-Emperor George VI himself. Ours seemed to me a good empire then, and on the whole I think so still. Over the years I have learnt to look back at it only occasionally with shame (the fundamental principle of empire having soured on all of us) but more often with a mixture of pride, affection and pathos.

For most of its citizenry the immense Habsburg dominion, too, was undoubtedly a happy enough construction—not for its subversive idealists, the nationalists and social reformers who found themselves ruthlessly suppressed, but for ordinary people who simply wanted to live in secure contentment. It was an autonomy of the stuffiest kind, but like Miramar it had charisma—the saving gift of grace. Its pomposity could be endearingly comical, and it had a gift for
Fortwursteln
, what the English called muddling through, which tempered its absurd obsessions about rules, ranks, regulations and forms of etiquette. Besides, in its apogee, which was also the apogee of Trieste, it did not work badly. Slow and laboured its methods might have been, but they gave people a comforting faith in the underlying competence and benevolence of Authority, however distant: and Authority itself, Authority almost in the abstract, was personified in the diligent figure of the Emperor, Franz Joseph the Father of his People, who went to his office in Vienna scrupulously at eight each morning, wore only a simple military uniform and preferred boiled beef and sauerkraut for his lunch. Many a simple citizen of Trieste doubtless thought of the imperial government, as did Joseph Roth’s character Andreas Pum, that it was like something in the sky—great, omnipotent, unknowable and mysterious. “Though it was a delusion that our fathers served,” wrote Stefan Zweig of his childhood’s empire, “it was a wonderful and noble delusion. . . .”

At one time or another the Habsburgs had ruled many parts of the world, but their Austrian empire had no overseas possessions, despite the Emperor’s hypothetical kingship in the Holy Land. This empire thought of itself as embracing rather than commanding, of assimilating all its scores of constituent peoples into one imperial family—the lesser nations were nations no more, but “provinces.” The empire’s only shoreline was on the Adriatic, and traditionally the Austrian fleet was no more than a theoretical factor in the balance of Europe. This made Miramar even more a paradigm: the little castle stood there with a toe in the world’s ocean, fancifully.

Trieste was one of the great achievements of Habsburg imperialism. Although it had been under their protection since 1382, the Austrians had shown little interest in the place until in 1719 Charles VI declared it a Free Port. It was his daughter Maria Theresa who caused the Canal Grande to be excavated, and presided over the construction of a brand-new town, still known as the
borgo teresiano
, the Theresian Quarter. This is the urbane development that cheered us up on our walk the other morning. It was designed by ardent graduates of the Academy of Graphic Arts in Vienna, who set out to create something fresh—a merchant city that was also a garden city, full of greenery and fountains, while obeying careful imperial laws concerning sanitation, safety and proportions. They filled in a mass of ancient salt-pans to do it, and they built the Theresian Quarter in a modestly elegant Neo-classical style, with touches of Baroque. It consists of some fifty rectangular blocks, plus the canal and a couple of squares, and the merchants who occupied most of the houses had warehouses on the ground floor, offices and family quarters above. At the same time new piers were built on the harbour front, a lighthouse was erected and a new lazaretto—all such handsome and expensive works that half a century later Napoleon, himself no niggard when it came to display, scoffed at their extravagance. All of a sudden Trieste became a proper port, equipped for ocean traffic.

At first it was essentially an emporium, a market-place where goods brought by land or sea were assembled for sale, and then sent off again—a kind of permanent trade fair, with transport facilities. Before long the port had to be extended, and two new town quarters were built, rather less delicately: in Joseph II’s time the
borgo giuseppino
, lapping at the walls of the Old City, and the
borgo franceschino
, named for Francis II, a little inland. All three quarters are still recognizable, and are known by their original names. But when in the 1850s the railways came down from Vienna, Trieste’s functions shifted. It became instead a transit port, through which goods sold at source were passed to their buyers—Bohemian glass ordered from Chicago, say, or Persian rugs destined for Munich. A whole
porto nuovo
was built, connecting with the railways on the northern side of the bay of Trieste. Now it is the
porto vecchio
, the Old Port, but then it was the very latest thing, and the Emperor himself came down to open it. Trieste entered its heyday. All the ancillaries of a port flourished—the agents, the financiers, the warehouse companies, the valuers, the ship repairers, the chandlers. Six banks and four great insurance companies dominated the city’s finances, and the Chamber of Commerce became almost a government in itself.

Into this dynamic seaport poured a polyglot multitude. Some had been officially encouraged to take their varied skills there; others were simply drawn by the promise of the place, on the cusp between east and west, where you could make money almost as fast as you could in a California gold rush. Karl Marx, writing about Trieste in 1857, said that it was run by “a motley crew of speculators,” Italian, German, English, French, Armenian and Jewish, which meant that it was not weighed down by tradition, and had the advantage, like the United States, of “not having any past.”

DURING the reigns of six monarchs (Charles VI, acceded 1711, to Franz Joseph I, died 1916), the Habsburgs transformed a medieval fishing town into a modern international seaport, with a population that had grown from some 7,000 to 220,000. Perhaps the nearest equivalent is Hong Kong, founded by the British in 1840, and equally eruptive.

Hong Kong was Britain’s declaration of intent in the Far East, and Trieste had a similarly symbolical meaning for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was not just a great commercial asset; it also declared this vast continental sovereignty to be a maritime Power as well. Ever since they assumed responsibility for Trieste, in 1382, the Austrians had maintained a handful of warships in this corner of the Mediterranean, and used them in one conflict or another—to bombard fractious Venetians, to deter the French or help keep Turks at bay. After the Napoleonic wars they took control of the whole northern Adriatic coastline, and an Imperial Navy formally came into being, based at Venice. Its ships were given the prefix “SMS,” for
Seiner Majestäts Schijf
. Its original professional style was British or German, but it grew to be thoroughly imperial, its ships Austrian-built, its officers Austrian gentlemen, its crews mostly Slavs.

When Venice was lost to the Austrians, in 1866, the fleet headquarters was moved to Trieste. This did not greatly please the merchants of the city, who thought it would leave the Venetians more time and space to rival them in commerce; nevertheless as a token of loyalty from the Chamber of Commerce they paid most of the cost of the fleet’s first steam warship, the frigate
Radetzky
, and they fulsomely welcomed the Archduke Maximilian when he arrived in town to become the fleet’s commander-in-chief. Very soon anyway the main base was moved again to the deeper and safer port of Pola, fifty miles away at the southern tip of the Istrian peninsula, but when the Imperial Navy wanted to put on a public show, with flags and manouevres before admiring grandees, inevitably it was in the bay of Trieste that its burnished ironclads assembled. When in 1866 the navy won a smashing victory over the Italians at the battle of Lissa, off the Dalmatian coast, no city in the entire empire, from the Turkish borders to the frontiers of Switzerland, celebrated more grandiloquently than Trieste.

By then Trieste occupied a special position in the Dual Monarchy (as the empire called itself when the Hungarians won their autonomy, and the ancient eagle of the Habsburgs acquired a second head). It was the chief port, whose water-gauge on the Canal Grande provided the zero point for all Austrian sea-charts. It was the capital of the Österreichischer Küstenland, the empire’s one coastal province, embracing the whole of Istria and much of Dalmatia. And since 1850 it had been a
reichsunmittelbar Stadt
, a city owing direct allegiance to the Emperor himself. Anyone in the whole empire who wanted to travel overseas came down here to take ship. Businessmen Austrian, Czech or Hungarian conducted their foreign trade through the bankers and agents of Trieste. Soldiers and sailors were stationed here, actors and musicians came from Vienna to perform, holidaymakers and valetudinarians flocked to the lovely Istrian resorts. Franz Joseph, the nineteenth Habsburg to govern the destinies of Trieste, sometimes condescended to visit the place; as a reward for its loyalty to the Crown during the nationalist uprisings of the 1840s, it was officially dubbed
Urbs Fidelissima
, Most Faithful City.

THE MOST appealing aspect of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at least in retrospect, was its European cosmopolitanism. It had few black, brown or yellow subjects, but it contained within itself half the peoples of Europe. It was multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-faith, bound together only, whether willingly or unwillingly, by the imperial discipline. It was closer to the European Community of the twenty-first century than to the British Empire of the nineteenth, and possesses still, at least for romantics like me, a fragrant sense of might-have-been. Trieste was its true epitome. When they sang “The Emperor’s Hymn,” surely the most beautiful of all national anthems (better known to most of us as the melody of “Deutschland, Deutsch-land, Über Alles”), proud loyalists of Trieste sang it in at least three of the ten languages into which the lyric had been officially translated. Even in the city’s imperial apogee, when it was known everywhere as an Austrian seaport, Trieste had a large Italian population, and its working language was Italian. Thousands of Slovenes and Croats had moved into town too, besides Marx’s motley crew of adventurers.

The annals of nineteenth-century Trieste are full of foreigners who made themselves rich and eminent here. Remnants of the ancient local nobility still lived darkly in the Old City, where they variously claimed descent from the Romans or from a medieval guild of aristocrats called the Thirteen Families. They were, however, overwhelmed by the flamboyant invasion of aliens. How could they match, from their cavernous and crumbling palaces, the brilliant German Baron Karl Ludwig von Brück, a visionary local magnate and politico who proclaimed Trieste to be the open door of an immense fraternity of nationalities? Or the dazzling nouveau-riche Egyptian Antonio Cassis, nicknamed “Faraone,” “Pharaoh”? The most lavish and prominent palazzo of the waterfront was built by the Greek shipowner Demetrio Carciotti, and the Englishman George Hepburn commissioned for himself a magnificent Pal-ladian villa in the most commanding site on The Promontory. The limitlessly rich Morpurgos were Jewish. The Giustinette family was really Armenian. The American John Allen owned Trieste’s first steamship.