The Habsburg Empire Before the War

Vienna During La Belle Epoque

In those days before the Great War when the events narrated in this book took place, it had not yet become a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When one of the living had been extinguished another did not at once take his place in order to obliterate him: there was a gap where he had been, and both close and distant witnesses of his demise fell silent whenever they became aware of his gap. When fire had eaten away a house from the row of others in a street, the burnt-out space remained long empty. Masons worked slowly and cautiously. Close neighbors and casual passers-by alike, when they saw the empty space, remembered the aspect and walls of the vanished house. That was how things were then.

Everything that grew took its time in growing and everything that was destroyed took a long time to be forgotten. And everything that had once existed left its traces so that in those days people lived on memories, just as now they live by the capacity to forget quickly and completely. . .

Franz Josef: the Very Picture of a Benign Monarch

He was an old man from an old era. The old men from the era before the Great War may have been more foolish than the young men of today. But in the moments that preceded those horrible ones and that in our time might be shrugged off with a casual joke, the old decent men maintained heroic equanimity. Nowadays the concepts of honor—professional, familial, and personal—that Herr von Trotta lived by seem like relics of implausible and juvenile legends. But in those days an Austrian district captain like Herr von Trotta would have been less shaken by the news of the sudden death of his only child than by the news of even a seemingly dishonorable action of that only child.

That lost era, which was virtually buried under the fresh grave mounds of the fallen, was ruled by very different notions. If someone offended the honor of an officer of the Imperial and Royal Army, and that officer failed to kill the man apparently because he owed him money, then that officer was a misfortune and worse than a misfortune: he was a disgrace to his progenitor, to the army, and to the monarchy.

Joseph Roth, Radetzky March