No Love at First Sight
Salzburg, Austrian since 1816
By Robert Hoffmann
Top Photo: View of Salzburg Cathedral. Anne Zeuner/ Salzburg Festival
Few people are probably aware that the federal state of Salzburg, which is geographically located in the center of the republic and whose scenic beauty and cultural significance have largely influenced the image of our country, was annexed by Austria in 1816, just over 200 years ago - centuries later than the neighboring states of Tirol, Styria and Upper Austria.
Until 1803, the state of Salzburg was a Prince-Archbishopric of the Holy Roman Empire. That year marked the end of the 1,100-year long secular reign of the archbishops, after the Bavarian Duke Theodor had given the ancient Roman city Luvavum to Rupert of Salzburg (the first Bishop of Salzburg and also the patron saint of the federal state of Salzburg). During the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), the former prince-archbishopric went through a three-time occupation by French troops and a fivefold change of nationality. It was only after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo that his former ally Bavaria agreed under military pressure to cede Salzburg to Austria in the spring of 1816.
This transitional period had a rather negative impact on Salzburg. Highly indebted, plundered and reduced to its most valuable territories, Salzburg was placed under Austrian rule. The enthusiasm of the people of Salzburg for yet another change of nationality, which was already dampened, fell silent soon after the handover ceremonies, as the Austrian integration took place under unfavorable conditions. The recession during the transformation into a peacetime economy was further intensified by the disruption of the financial system and above all, by the crop failure in 1816. Back then, it was unknown that the “Year Without a Summer” was a result of the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before.
In the autumn of 1816, the people of Salzburg already suffered from food scarcity and increased food prices. A police report from October 28, 1816, states: “Every week, the price of bread and other items rises. You hear people in the streets complaining and sighing loudly about the hard times. The economy is at an all-time low, jobs for the working class decline with each passing day, causing more and more misery and despair.” Adding to this unfavorable situation during the integration into the Austrian Empire was the fact that Salzburg had lost the best agricultural parts to Bavaria. The Ziller Valley, which formerly belonged to Salzburg, was also lost and handed over to Tirol as a sign of recognition for its loyalty to the imperial house during the Napoleonic era. The fear that the mutilated state would not have its own administration was confirmed soon after the change of government.
In order to save costs, Emperor Francis I rejected Salzburg's petition for its own state government, and instead placed Salzburg as the fifth county under the state government of Upper Austria in Linz. In a petition, the citizens of Salzburg unsuccessfully tried to convince Emperor Francis I of the necessity of the archbishop's residence, a state government of its own, the restoration of the estates of Salzburg, as well as their own university, which had been abolished by the Bavarians.
By addressing the emperor, they intended to “at least save Salzburg to some degree, which had fallen to a village of the poor with empty palaces.” In its reply, the government in Vienna objected to the “inappropriate style of the request, whose evident purpose is only to overshadow the present administration with unfavorable comparisons.” The residents of the city of Salzburg were particularly hard hit by the degradation of the state. The loss of the residence and capital function was emotionally and economically difficult to cope with. At the end of the 18th century, fifty percent of the city's population were dependent on the archbishop's court, either working as an official or a servant at the court.
Merchants and traders relied on the consumption of the court and the numerous civil servants to make their living. The descent to Linz's subordinate county led to a massive migration of the former court staff, the officials and the intelligentsia from Salzburg. In 1800, Salzburg counted 550 officials and other servants, including judges and teachers; this number fell rapidly to 162 in the first years of the Austrian administration. It is not surprising that the population of the city of Salzburg fell from about 16,000 inhabitants at the end of the 18th century to about 11,000 after the annexation by Austria. Instead of the court and the princely state government, Salzburg received its orders from Linz or Vienna.
Under the order of the court police and censorship office in Vienna, subordinate officials suspiciously controlled every movement of the public opinion in Salzburg during the entire era of Vormärz (“pre-March” in English, also known as the Age of Metternich, which preceded the 1848 March Revolutions). However, the image of the Habsburg administration as cumbersome and incapable of modernizing during that time is not completely true. A counterexample is the precise planning and efficient implementation of land surveying within the framework of the Francis’ Cadastre (named after the Austrian Emperor Francis I), a large-scale project to establish a single legal area in soil evaluation and taxation matters. The Habsburg administration also proved to be efficient in other areas.
A number of infrastructure projects, which were started during the Vormärz and intensively continued after 1848, such as road constructions and the regulation of the Salzach river in the Pinzgau region, were seen in a positive light by the rural population. The urban bourgeoisie (social middle class), on the other hand, was unable to see the positive aspects of Austrian rule during the European Restoration. The degradation to provincialism, which affected the city of Salzburg more than the already suburban counties of Inner Gebirg (Inner Mountains), was particularly depressing.
The Viennese composer Franz Schubert, for instance, talked about the “grass on Salzburg’s squares,” which became a popular metaphor for the provincial sleepiness of the city during the Biedermeier period. Numerous descriptions convey the image of a period of decline, characterized by political peace of the graveyard and economic decline. Although Emperor Francis I. granted the state a few visits, the former princearchbishopric and now imperial residence remained abandoned for decades, before Francis’ widow Caroline Auguste developed a special interest in the city, where she regularly spent the summer months from 1848 onwards.
However, in this period of decline, one industry gradually started to boom, namely tourism, which has been critical for the prosperity of the region until the present day. The basis for modern-day Salzburg tourism was provided by artists of the Romantic period, who came to Salzburg after the end of the Napoleonic wars. Their pictures and drawings significantly helped to spread the knowledge of the beauty of Salzburg’s landscape throughout Europe. In the artists’ opinion, the city and the surrounding landscape formed an inseparable unity. On their flight from the present into a more beautiful past, the painters and draftsmen of the Romantic period felt particularly attracted to the flair of the decayed and economically stagnating old city.
Around 1830, the artistic discovery of Salzburg – both state and city – was completed. Under the influence of tourism, which became a mass phenomenon for the bourgeoisie, the elite visions of the Romantic artists soon turned into stereotypes with broad impact. The economic stagnation was kept out of sight for the tourist, who only had eyes for the beautiful scenery.
In the 1830s and 1840s, crowds of tourists traveled to Salzburg and to the neighboring Salzkammergut region, which also became a top tourist destination at the same time. In the course of this romantic “discovery,” a roster of must-see sights and attractions evolved, which all first-time visitors of Salzburg had to put on their travel itinerary. In addition to the sights of the city and the Salzkammergut region, these included, for example, the Golling waterfalls and Lake Königssee in Berchtesgaden. It is quite surprising that Salzburg’s few flamboyant Gothic buildings were more appealing than today’s world-renowned Baroque appearance.
View of the city of Salzburg with Hohensalzburg Fortress in the background
Photo: Salzburg Tourism
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Salzburg’s greatest son, attracted only a few visitors to the city on the Salzach river before the 1840s. Hardly anyone knew that he was born in Salzburg and had lived in the city for a very long time. An initiative for the erection of a Mozart monument, which was initiated by members of the “Museum Society,” Salzburg’s oldest association, marked an important turning point. Against the will of the authorities, who delayed the approval of the erection as long as possible, financial help came from Bavaria. The unveiling of the Mozart monument in September 1842 in the presence of numerous dignitaries from all over the German-speaking world was a success and strengthened the self confidence of the Salzburg bourgeoisie towards the government. But above all, with the erection of the monument, the title “City of Mozart” once and for all belonged to Salzburg, which was able to outstrip the imperial capital Vienna.
With some delay compared to Vienna, associations and clubs were organized, which was very typical for this period of time. As early as 1841, the Dommusikverein (Cathedral Music Association) was founded, which laid the foundation for the later Mozarteum music academy. During this decade many associations like the Salzburger Kunstverein (Salzburg Art Association) or the Salzburger Liedertafel (Salzburger Choral Society) were founded by artists and representatives of civil society.
Vinzenz Maria Süß, author and court official, played an important role. His efforts to build a museum for the city aimed at proving the existence of an independent cultural life of Salzburg’s civic society. With the support of other court officials, advocates and merchants, a Salzburg identity was gradually developed as part of a liberal citizens’ movement. There was, however, no opposition against the rule of the absolutist police state, which practiced censorship and surveillance on a massive scale. This left only a retreat into the relatively non-political areas of economy, culture and social life.
The development of a bourgeoisie took place in Salzburg only in the course of the Revolutions of 1848 in the Austrian Empire. The end of the Metternich era enabled the political forces in Vienna and the whole empire to emancipate. The long-preserved request for the administrative separation from Upper Austria and a state government of its own was finally granted in 1849.
The first election of an autonomous Salzburg state parliament was held in 1861, after the final breakthrough of a liberal-constitutional system in the Habsburg monarchy. Around 1860, a decisive period of political and economical modernization took place in Salzburg. The long-awaited connection to the railroad network in May 1860 created a link to the world. Almost around the same time, the construction ban in front of the old fortifications was lifted, which had prevented urban development until then. After decades of stagnation, the city and state of Salzburg entered a phase of rapid change in all areas of life.
When the Salzburg physician and historian Franz Valentin Zillner critically assessed the first 50 years under Austrian rule in 1866, he also found very positive effects of Salzburg’s annexation by Austria. During this fifty-year period, Salzburg gradually got used to “the powerful impulses, but also to the sharper breeze from the central state. The empire to which Salzburg now belongs,” Zillner says, takes care “most generously” of road construction, river regulation, and much more. Above all, the “pressure on intellectuals” and the paternalism by the police were finally been relaxed, so his assessment was in favor of the Austrian rule. “The country progressed intellectually, socially, politically and economically; successfully enjoyed all the advantages of a member state of the Austrian Empire without losing its state identity, but rather strengthen it”. Ultimately, it took Salzburg half a century to be fully integrated and to find an independent identity within the empire.
Finally, I would like to ask which achievements by the archbishops remain after the secularization and the integration of Salzburg into the Austrian state. According to the local historian Heinz Dopsch, the answer is quite clear: No other state and no other city in Austria, nor in Central Europe, to be more precise, were defined by ecclesiastical principality like Salzburg. In spite of all the plundering and losses during the years after secularization, the archbishops left the people of Salzburg an invaluable heritage of art and architecture, with the historic city center of Salzburg as a magnificent testimony.
Today, over 200 years after Salzburg’s annexation by Austria, this cultural heritage is an undeniable part of the Austrian national identity, not only of Salzburg’s. At the same time, the memory of the former independence is very much alive in the pride of the people of Salzburg.
Robert Hoffmann is Professor Emeritus of Modern History and Modern Austrian History at the University of Salzburg. His fields of interests include the history of Salzburg in the 19th and 20th centuries, the social history of the Austrian bourgeoisie, the history of tourism, and the social history of housing and settlement policies in Austria (1918-38). He is the author of Mythos Salzburg. Bilder einer Stadt (2002), Salzburg. Die Geschichte einer Stadt (2008, with H. Dopsch), and Bürger zwischen Tradition und Modernität (ed. 1997).
Translated by Julia Aßl