The Emperor and the Peasant: Two Men at the Start of the Great War and the End of the Habsburg Empire Paperback – Illustrated, December 28, 2017

Author Kenneth Janda with a candid portrayal on how the actions of one can so demonstrably affect another. An excellent read!

This very interesting and worthy book does not have perhaps the most helpful title. It is indeed organized around the themes of the emperor—namely Franz Joseph, the long-ruling and almost last emperor of the Habsburg regime in Austria-Hungary—and a peasant, Samuel Mozolak, a Slovak. The chapters alternate between focus on the one and the other.But the bigger picture is telling the story of World War I from a perspective Americans very rarely hear. We know all about trench warfare on the Western front and “gallant little Belgium,” maybe that Brits still wear red poppies on Armistice Day (Nov. 11, our Veterans’ Day) and how the whole thing inevitably led to World War II. But that focus is very western, inclined to blame Germany, overlooking the rather significant fact that the war actually started with Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia (Serbia!) because of a Serbian nationalist’s assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne. That set off a chain reaction that really did engage most of the world in war at some level. But in terms of sheer numbers, the eastern side of the war suffered far more casualties and destruction than the west. Janda’s book sets out to tell World War I from the eastern perspective.The trope of emperor/peasant allows Janda to get at the story in a unique way, inviting reflection on methods of government and what ordinary people suffer at the hands of ignorant rulers. Reading this book I was really amazed to realize afresh that autocratic, royal or imperial government was still really a live option a mere hundred years ago! Those of us who worry about the state of democracy could probably benefit from the reality check that it’s still a young experiment—and that the alternative is just unbelievably dreadful. Kings are best kept in fairy tales. Emperor Franz Joseph was not a particularly wicked soul, but by definition as a solitary person raised in unrepresentative circumstances he simply could fathom what was happening in the world or what his people were going through. As Janda shows, neither could Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany or Tsar Nicholas in Russia. It’s no accident that their rule disintegrated—but also no accident that their nations, with no experience of collective, democratic, or republican rule, swiftly fell to the temptations of new autocracies in the form of fascism and communism.The story of the peasant is depressing in its own way, but has a sort-of happy ending that the Habsburg house doesn’t. Mozolak and his wife spent two stints in America, working for a better life, before Mozolak was drafted and killed in battle. Like so many other peasants who had no idea what they were fighting for and would have disagreed if they’d known, they were the victims of powers indifferent to their fate. And yet, Mozolak’s children ended up emigrating to the US and making a new life for themselves, and each generation has done better than the one before. Immigration and democracy show promise: imperial autocracy and sharp ethnic borders do not.Along the way Janda gives us close-ups of war, with interesting digressions on, for example, the role that railways played in WWI or how the huge range of languages within Austria-Hungary made military discipline difficult. The moral of the story comes out at the end: the immense complexity of forming nations out of former empires along the lines of ethnic self-determination. Woodrow Wilson and the Western European powers ignorantly thought it would be easy to carve up the leftovers of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires into new nations with clean borders. They were wrong—as subsequent events have proven. There have never been clean lines between peoples, and ongoing tension in these regions are premised on the faulty assumption that there should be. Empires were disasters in their own way, but that doesn’t make nations self-evidently ideal. By contrast, Janda argues that America’s strength has lain precisely in the mixing-up of peoples and the extraordinary benefits that immigration has brought it. (Ahem. May people in power deciding on these things pay due attention to this fact.)Only two small complaints about the book. One is that the constant reference to previous chapters was rather tedious to someone reading right through it; it would have been better if the author had granted that we remembered what he already said. Similarly, the second flaw is the extreme reliance on quotes from other authors. Granted, Janda’s strategy was not so much new research or findings but collecting those of others into a new and illuminating whole, but at times it felt a bit like a term paper, trying to prove and document every claim in the words of others.That said, this is an excellent corrective to the western bias of most tellings of WWI and opens up a fresh discussion of the nature of governance, empire, and nationhood.