Oskar Halecki and the End of Austria-Hungary

Multinationalism in an Age of Nationalism

This Christmas I happily stumbled upon a book I have wanted to get my hands on for a while: Damir Agičić’s Srednjoeuropske teme (Central European Themes). The book - from a leading Croatian historian of East-Central Europe - is a collection of essays on topics related to the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, mostly on various inter-Slavic relations. A better title perhaps would have been Neo-Slavic Themes, but I digress.

One of the essays deals with the unique and little-known family background of Oskar Halecki. This Polish historian was one of the most prominent Catholic emigre historians during the Cold War. He was a pioneer of the historiographical concept of Eastern Europe in the interwar years, later refashioning it into a narrative of East-Central Europe as the ‘borderlands of Western Civilization’. The view was later popularized by Milan Kundera’s 1984 essay ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’ which sparked a much wider debate on Central Europe that took on a new sense of importance after the end of the Cold War and ‘reunification’ of Europe.

Ignoring Halecki’s later career, his family background is a fascinating microcosm of family life in the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. As famous as it became for its nationalities conflicts, multilingualism, mixed marriages, national apostasy and indifference were all central to life in the Austro-Hungarian fin de siècle too.

Halecki was born in Vienna in 1891. His father was a field marshal in the Austro-Hungarian army and his mother was a Croatian noblewoman named Leopoldina Delimanić. When the elder Halecki died in 1903, the family moved to Krakow, where Halecki finished school and university. Despite what might be assumed from his father’s name, or his mother’s background, the family language was German. Halecki corresponded with his mother in German her whole life, even if she probably learned at least some Polish over the decades she lived in Krakow.

This was presumably the family language more generally, since German was also the language the elder Halecki and his wife (who was eighteen years younger than him) used. Not only did he not speak Croatian, but he did not even know Polish despite priding himself on being a Polish nobleman, whose family originated from eastern Galicia (today’s Ukraine).

The Delimanići were an old Slavonian noble family with a long tradition of state service on the local level. According to Agičić the family was spread out across three main cities by the time Halecki was born: Graz, Vienna, and Osijek (or Esseg/Essek in German). The last of these was where the elder Halecki served. Long part of the Habsburg Military Frontier, it was the most German city in Croatia. In 1900 it still boasted a German(-speaking) majority, while a majority of Croatians living there similarly spoke German according to the 1910 census.

The multinational character of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, particularly of its loyal military-bureaucratic elite is striking not just in Leopoldina’s marriage with the elder Halecki, but through all her sisters’ marriages too. The oldest, Helena, married one Ignaz Jankovics von Csalam (the name indicating Slavic descent but Hungarian identity); Marija firstly to a Serbian Obrenović and then Graz native Franz Freiherr von Wolkensperg; Stefanija to one Albin Seemann von Treuenwart; and the youngest, Marta, to Julius Rukavina von Vezinovac. All of these husbands were officers. Only one sister, Ana, married an engineer (though still a noble) called Wilhelm Ritter Ozorins Bukowski. The name suggests Polish origin, though it is possible that like the elder Halecki he was a German speaker.

If Halecki’s father had not died when he was a boy the family might never have moved on to Krakow. Oskar Halecki might not have ended up a Polish historian at all. Indeed, if the year his father died was not so volatile in Croatia and the wider Balkans, Leopoldina might have chosen to return to her homeland with her young son instead. Halecki then might, like Emilij Laszowski, ended up a Croatian of Polish descent rather than a Pole of Croatian descent.

But as was the case for many brilliant minds that emerged from the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, history conspired to him an American. Halecki fled Nazi-occupied Europe in 1940 never to return. He died in White Plains, New York in 1973 after decades spent as a professor at various American universities.