Between Two Empires — Bruno Brehm: Die Throne stürzen (1931–33/1951)

The year 1932 saw the publication of two novels that today enjoy iconic status across modern Austrian and German literature: Joseph Roth's elegaic Radeztkymarsch, and the second installment of Robert Musil's majestic fragment Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities). Sadly, neither man rated the other's work very highly. Musil dismissed Radetzkymarsch as a typical “Kasernenroman” (novel of military life); Roth was exasperated by Musil's repeated use of the word “Kakanien” to designate the Habsburg Empire whose death throes had inspired them both. Insofar as each instrumentalizes aspects of recent history, rather than dealing directly with the immediate present, the novels exemplify a widespread trend in the German-language novel of the day. It is less well remembered that 1932 also marked the publication of Das war das Ende (That was the End), the second of three ambitious historical novels charting the decline of the Habsburgs by the Slovenianborn Nazi Bruno Brehm, a writer who had found fame through the very “Kasernenromane” that Musil disparaged.

Not quite forgotten today, Brehm's trilogy opens with Apis und Este: Ein Franz Ferdinand-Roman (Apis and Este: A Franz Ferdinand Novel, 1931), a work beginning with the assassination of the King and Queen of Serbia in 1903 and climaxing in the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in June 1914. The second novel Das war das Ende examines the political machinations starting in Brest-Litowsk in December 1917 and ending with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919, the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.