Bury the Old World Order: The old ways of dealing with Russia no longer apply.
By Tom McTague
February 25, 2022, 7 AM ET
The great Austrian novelist Joseph Roth died a few months before the Hitlerian cataclysm that he foresaw. At his end, in 1939, Roth was living in exile in Paris, penniless and alcoholic, broken by the extinguishment of the mitteleuropa of his childhood. Roth had been born in 1894 in a place called Brody, a small town in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire but is now Ukraine. Today, this little town of Roth’s childhood is under threat once more.
Roth is best-known for his novel The Radetzky March, chronicling the end of the Habsburg empire—a tragedy as far as he was concerned. But The Bust of the Emperor, another of his melancholy works, feels more prophetic today, as the Russian army swarms across Ukraine. In this novella, Roth takes the reader to the land of his childhood, before it was washed away in the swells of European nationalism, war, and savagery.
The main character in Roth’s story is the aristocratic Count Morstin, the scion of an old Polish family of Italian descent, who thinks of himself as neither Polish nor Italian but “beyond nationality.” Morstin, like Roth, loathed the very idea of nationalism, which he saw as a small, dank cabin compared with the “large house with many doors and many rooms for many different kinds of people” that was the old Habsburg monarchy. In The Bust of the Emperor, Roth tells how Count Morstin comes to terms with the loss of his homeland. But the story, really, is about the loss of a way of life, the loss of an age—the loss of an order. This loss is signified throughout the novella by a bust of the old Austrian emperor Franz Joseph that Morstin keeps outside his manor house in a village near Brody.
Today, from Brody to Kharkiv, we are seeing, once again, the collapse of an age, and perhaps with it an order. Like Count Morstin, we must now reckon with this change. For so long many of us have avoided making the imaginative leap required to believe that a modern political leader could order the invasion of a European country. Despite the growing evidence to the contrary, many diplomats, officials, and analysts refused to seriously believe the American and British intelligence warnings about the imminence of an attack. For many in the West, it seems, wars of aggression are things that happen to poor countries a long way away. They are done by us. They are not done to us. And yet this has happened. The images filtering onto our timelines, of Russian helicopters flying over European cities, do not seem real. And yet they are. Photographs of exploded Russian armaments seem jarring because they have been taken in noticeably European settings. In one published by Radio Free Europe, a Domino’s is visible just behind the carnage.
Europeans in particular have displayed an unusually emotional response to the shock of Putin’s invasion. The chief of the German army, Alfons Mais, posted a startlingly brutal assessment of the situation on his LinkedIn page, declaring that the Bundeswehr has been left “blank,” (presumably because of years of free riding on the coattails of its American protector), its options to support the Western alliance limited. “We all saw it coming and were unable to penetrate with our arguments to draw and implement the conclusions of the annexation of Crimea,” he wrote. Former German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer joined in the self-recrimination, writing that she was “angry at ourselves for our historical failure” to act, after Putin’s interventions in Georgia, Crimea, and Donbas, in a way that could have deterred the Russian leader.
Full story: theatlantic.com |
