“The Radetzky March” Plays for Us All

Monday is a holiday in Austria that was traditionally Catholic. It marks the Assumption of Mary’s death. Orthodox Christians also observe this feast, but we refer to it as Mary’s “Dormition”, which is the act of falling asleep. Out in the city, I stopped by the Paulanerkirche, whose building dates to the last 17th and early 18th century, to pray. I spent 45 minutes offering a particularly long Orthodox akathist (like a litany) in honor of the Holy Virgin on this feast day. The whole church was mine, although I could see a small part of it at the back because the iron bars were closing off most of its nave. They might have to be concerned about vandalism.

The interior design of this church’s Baroque-inspired interior isn’t to my liking. Baroque architecture is not my favorite, and that puts Habsburglandia in an unfortunate position. It could have been the dim lighting, but the church looked almost like dried flowers. I was standing in the back, praying when I saw a couple of people come in. The majority of the visitors were elderly women who offered a short prayer. Half of them were grandmothers or middle-aged ladies with an adolescent child. The adults prayed together, but the children did not cross their arms or make any gestures, even if they thought it was a pious act. They were not rude, they just seemed bored.

I thought about this later, after a text conversation with a friend urging him to read Joseph Roth’s great 1932 novel The Radetzky March. Don’t delay if you don’t have time to read this book. This is not only one of the most important political novels, it transcends politics. This is the story of how the Austro–Hungarian Empire fell, told through three generations of one Slovenian family. The book opens on the battlefield at Solferino, when Austrian troops faced off against French and Italian armies in 1859. Franz Joseph, a young Kaiser, saw the battle and stood in plain sight of an enemy spy. Trotta was a Slovenian Infantry Lieutenant and saw danger. He jumped to confront the Kaiser, and took the bullet meant for him sovereign. Trotta was raised to nobility by the grateful Kaiser.

Yet, the new ennobled Trotta wasn’t a country man and didn’t like being called the “Hero of Solferino”. Trotta didn’t consider himself worthy and found it difficult to move in high society circles. He eventually visited Kaiser Friedrich II to ask him to correct the imperial history book’s official account. To his credit, he believed that the official story exaggerated his act to make him appear more heroic than he was. The Kaiser said, “Oh, no, it’s not so bad.” He also spoke of patriotism. The Austrians were defeated at Solferino and required some consolation. Franz Joseph chooses to take all the historical facts out of history books rather than alter them to make it more truthful. This is where we see that the Kaiser has too much affection for the imperial story to be able to address facts. He keeps enriching his subjects and thinking that he is doing them all great favors by bestowing imperial favor. It would be the end of the Trottas.

The Hero in Solferino was also a Baron von Trotta’s son. He grew up completely devoted to Habsburg worship. He was discouraged by his father from choosing a military career and he ended up becoming a civil servant, the most prestigious job in the empire. Second Baron von Trotta was a rigid, inflexible patriot. The title of the book comes from the Strauss piece composed in 1848 to honor an Austrian field marshal who had won a great victory. Roth described it as “the Marseillaise” for monarchists. Roth describes the stirring music as a sort of hymn.

Karl Joseph is the third Baron von Trotta. His father pushes him into a military career, but he’s not ready for it. He falls for the trap of a wastrel despite his wealth. He begins to realize the cruelty inherent in the imperial system. His father does not believe in him. He dies a pointless and inhumane death at the hands of the World War I soldiers. This is the conflict to which his mindless faith and that of his fathers have condemned him and a whole generation. Their deaths were for an illusion. It had not been an illusion in ages past, but as the 19th century progressed, the institutions of the empire failed to pass on to the next generation the convictions that animated it. Philip Rieff noted that institutions and systems die when their core beliefs are not transmitted to new generations. This is a fundamental human law.

The thing about Roth is that he wasn’t a good diagnostician for empire’s flaws. He missed the opportunities it provided. Roth believed that the new world after the empire was poor, shallow, and without any values. He also thought it was driven by only sensuality, commercialism, and a lack of morality. He was not willing to lie about his patriotic beliefs. Although he mourned the loss, he also illustrated why in his novel of decadence.

In this 2004 essay about Roth, the New Yorker says:

In one of Roth’s late novels, “The Emperor’s Tomb,” a character says that Austria-Hungary was never a political state; it was a religion. James Wood wrote an excellent essay about Roth and said that yes. He made the point profoundly by saying that “the state disappoints like God” by showing how it is inexplicable by being too many. Roth views the state as a myth. It is, along with other myths like Christianity, Judaism and the Austrian Idea, an organizer of experience. A net of stories, images, in which we can capture our lives and make sense of them, is called the myth of the state. If such myths fail, there is no way to recover any meaning or emotion. In Roth’s books, disasters tend to happen quietly and modestly. The street lamps long for the dawn in “The Emperor’s Tomb”, so they can be turned off.

Maybe you now see why. While contemplating the indifference shown by young Christians to Paulanerkirche, the Radetzky March played in the background. Christianity, according to the “myth”, is an organizer of experiences and the explanation of our existence. In contemporary Europe, it has failed. God knows this, and I am a Christian. But we must look at the world in its current state. Although I pray and hope that it can be revived, there is no doubt that the majority of Europe has gone post-Christian. As the great church historian Robert Louis Wilken wrote in this must-read 2004 essay in First Things:

Last spring on a trip to Erfurt, the medieval university town in Germany famous for its Augustinian cloister in which Martin Luther was ordained to the priesthood, I learned that only twenty percent of its population professed adherence to Christianity. In fact, when the topic of religion came up in a conversation with a young woman in a hotel lounge, and I asked her whether she was a member of a church, she replied without hesitation: Ich bin Heide–“I am a heathen.”

It is hardly surprising to discover pagans in the heart of Western Europe where Christianity once flourished: a steep decline in the number of Christians has been underway for generations, even centuries. I was surprised by her lack of embarrassment when she used the word “heathen”. She didn’t say she stopped going to church anymore or she wasn’t a Christian. She said that Christianity, which was no doubt her grandparent’s religion, wasn’t on her horizon. Two days before, my train stopped in Fulda. Fulda is where St. Boniface (the apostle of the Germans) was buried. Boniface had gone to Germany to convert the heathen, and in a spectacular and courageous gesture he felled the sacred oak at Geismar. Boniface preached and was baptized to the astonished crowd. If Christianity wants to thrive again in the region between the Elbe and the Rhine, then a new Boniface must appear to destroy the holy oaks of European secularism.

But what had a deeper impact on me was the discussion over the preface for the new Constitution of the European Union. I was in Italy and followed the discussions in the Italian media. The history of all the EU nations is Christian. Europe’s very existence was the result of Christian civilisation. With the blessing from the bishop of Rome, the first people to unite the west and east sides of the Rhine was the Carolingians. Europe’s story is not a tale of geography or economics but of spiritual convictions. The EU constitution’s framers refuse to even mention Christianity in the preface. While readily acknowledging the inheritance of pagan Greece and Rome, and even the Enlightenment, Europe’s political-bureaucratic elites have chosen to excise any mention of Christianity from Europe’s history. They have not only excluded Christianity from Europe’s future, but they also expelled Christianity from Europe’s history. It is not clear if the new Europe that has been evicted from Christianity will still promote those spiritual values which have made Western Civilization so unique.

As I listened to the EU Constitution debate in Erfurt, and talked with the young Erfurt woman, I was struck by the question of the future Christian culture. We have seen the fall of Christian civilization in my lifetime. The disintegration process was initially slow and gradual. However, today, the pace has accelerated and is becoming more deliberate. This has been promoted not only by those who despise Christianity, but also by Christians.

Like Pope Francis with his war against the Latin mass. That’s another story.

To my mind, it is clear that the myths of individualism and hedonism have replaced Christianity as central myths for the youth in the West. Over the weekend, a Muslim traveler shared with me that “the Machine”, (his term), is trying to make us all children who have no religion or history and live only by our appetites and are perfect consumers. This Muslim man was absolutely right. He also said that this is a trial the Islamic world will not be able avoid. He said, “We’re all in it together brother.” Here is the place we find ourselves as civilization. It is difficult to understand why many Christians cannot and won’t read signs of the times, particularly in the clerical ranks.

But then, Roth doesn’t show you how it works. It is easy to get lost in routines and lose sight of what can be done to save it. In The Radetzky March, the second Baron von Trotta barely has a personality of his own. He has become a vessel through which Empire worship is pouring. In his own writing, the Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) detected the decay of Christianity in his native Denmark. His final work, titled Attack Upon Christendom, was a powerful polemic against the state Lutheran church. Kierkegaard accused the church of being dead, and reduced Christianity to a mere Danish citizen. He famously stated in the book that if people can be considered Christians simply because they are citizens of the state then Christianity is no more. Kierkegaard believed that Christianity was an individual drama where each person had to meet God. The faith will fade if you lose this primal encounter and its necessity in each generation.

This is the current crisis Christians living in the West face, and it has been for some time. Back in 1966, the great Philip Rieff saw it coming, and said it was in fact already here, but the clerics refused to see it. The heart of Christianity had been cut out and sacrificed on the altar of the Thirty Years War (1914-1945), and more broadly, for the individualistic pleasures of modernity. (The book to read about all this is Carl Trueman’s bestseller Strange New World, a more accessible abridgement of his early analysis of how we got here.) I get an email every couple of weeks from someone who says, inevitably, that they thought my 2017 book The Benedict Option, which explores how to live faithfully in the post-Christian West, was alarmist, but now they see that it was prophetic. As a Christian father who must try to preserve their faith in an hostile environment, I have no regrets about being wrong. But Christians who don’t see the time will act like second Baron von Trotta in his tragic belief that the Empire would never end and that their sons would be the same as him.

This is not a call to despair. This is not a call to despair. It’s true for the Church, or plural, in this time and it has been true for America in recent years. It felt almost like the visual equivalent to Strauss’s “Radetzky March” as I walked through its aisles. This was an artistic expression of a feeling that appeared forced but not compelling when I visited CPAC last year.

Don’t misunderstand me. I do not question the patriotism displayed by the CPAC members. It’s difficult for me to see the absurd displays of patriotism as a way to understand what America has become. Since long, our elites have tried to discredit faith in America’s founding principles and founders. It doesn’t take a belief in the founders as gods walking among us to see that this extraordinary feat is worthy of preservation and veneration. Many of the journalists and scholars have done a lot to ruin not just the image of these great men but the principles they stood for.

We can’t blame only the liberals or the progressives. How has patriotism changed for us all? My own tribal patriotism — from which I was born — served two purposes: to justify and silence those who disagreed with the war in Iraq and as a way to label them “unpatriotic conservatives”. Further, the belief systems that once supported America have lost their appeal to younger generations. It is just one part of an even larger decadence. It is not unusual for a young man to look around and wonder what he is protecting.

A few weeks back, I took my son to see the Kapuzinergruft, the burial place of Habsburg royalty since the 17th century. It is the central Vienna crypt of Capuchin. This is truly a marvel. Viennese people love a beautiful end. It is hard to believe the elaborate graves of Habsburg’s greats. It struck me as we passed these graves and paid our respects. These bodies once held immense power. These men and women used to be the rulers of large parts of Europe during Europe’s greatest civilization. They are now all gone and stored in a vault under a cathedral in a beautiful, wealthy, democratic city. Sic Transit gloria Mundi. It’s important to visit the Kapuzinergruft for the same reason it’s important to visit the ruins of ancient Rome: to be reminded of what happens to all power and pomp in this mortal world.

But we know it is coming. We can at best recognize the coming disaster and devise ways to push it further into the future. True patriots and true Christians would be eager to achieve this. Our human nature makes it impossible to imagine just how fragile and vulnerable we all are. If you read The World Of Yesterday, the great memoir of Roth’s friend Stefan Zweig, written from his exile from the Nazis, you’ll get a good sense of how Vienna around the turn of the 20th century felt. The Empire was powerful, rich and glorious. But beneath it all, the empire was weakened by decadence. The same thing happened across Europe.

We also have to be open-minded, Americans, Europeans and Christians from the West. We don’t know what is coming tomorrow, but to read The Radetzky March is to sensitize oneself to the melody of doom floating on the late summer breeze. Complacency by the second Baron von Trotta led the faithlessness and indifference of the third. The mindless devotion to the imperial myth resulted in the loss of a whole generation and the end of its ways of living.

Why has this happened in Christianity?

Why is this happening in America?

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This is the photo of Franz Joseph’s tomb, with his wife, Empress Sisi. Their presence is powerful and it’s quite humbling to realize the ultimate leveller.