My grandmother told me that in Prague one day, when she was a child, she saw a man throwing coins onto the street and yet nobody was picking them up. Then her mother explained that those coins weren’t valid because the Austro-Hungarian Empire had ceased to exist, and, on that very day, October 28th, 1918, Prague had become the capital of a new state, Czechoslovakia. The little girl didn’t understand a thing: how could she possibly be living in a different country if everything was as before, and there were families living in her apartment block who spoke German and Yiddish, as well as Czech?
Central European literature has described the various ethnic groups and nations which made up the complex fabric of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Before the Great War, these peoples supported the Empire, although there were separatist groups who sought to break it apart; the novel The Good Solider Svejk by the Czech Jaroslav Hasek, focuses on these tendencies. Miklos Bánffy, in his Transylvanian Trilogy, illustrates the turmoil of the years leading up to the Great War, both from the Hungarian standpoint as well as that of the Viennese politicians. Joseph Roth, a firm supporter of the Empire, prophesies in The Radetzky March: “When the Emperor says goodbye, we will be split into a hundred pieces./…/ Each people will set up its miserable statelet/…/Nationalism is the new religion.”
Nationalist and separatist movements grew in strength…