National Cultural Centers of the

Habsburg Empire Before 1914: Zagreb1

The importance of turn-of-the-century Vienna for modern Western civi-

lization is such that it is difficult for any educated person to be unaware of the
political and cultural changes taking place in that city at that time. Against a
background of social and political disintegration, the intellectual and cultural
elite of Vienna—and particularly its younger members—revolted against the
rationalistic, legalistic, and moralistic liberalism of nineteenth-century
Europe. Parliamentary politics in Vienna yielded to mass politics, increas-
ingly strident in tone and negative in its goal. At the same time rationalist
views of human nature were giving way before the psychoanalytic theories of
the Viennese Sigmund Freud. Aestheticism became a refuge from life for
many of the city's young intellectuals. Its literary men turned inward to study
the psychology of the individual or uphold the goal of art for art's sake. The
home of Mozart, Beethoven, and the Strausses gave birth at the turn of the
century to the first works of Schoenberg. Academic formalism in painting
came under attack from the Viennese Secession. And the city of the monu-
mental historical eclecticism of the Ringstrasse gave rise to architectural crit-
ics who sought a new architecture expressing modern, not by-gone, life. The
very phrase "turn-of-the-century Vienna" conjures up the names of a dis-
parate group of famous—or infamous—giants of modern culture and poli-
tics: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Kokoschka, Klimt, Schoenberg, Mahler,
Lueger, even the young Hitler.
Needless to say, the phrase "turn-of-the-century Zagreb'' has no such res-
onance. About 175 miles southwest of Vienna, the Transleithanian provin-
cial city of Zagreb had only local importance as the largest city and
administrative capital of the Kingdom of Croatia and as the cultural center of
the Habsburg Empire's Croats. It was the seat of the sabor, or provincial as-
sembly, and of the Croatian government, which enjoyed a limited autonomy
within the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy. The city was also the site of
a cluster of Croatian cultural institutions, including the University of Zagreb,
the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences, several museums, and a Croat-
ian opera and theater company. Finally, it was the site of the most important
Croatian publishing houses and literary magazines. If it had little interna-
tional significance, Zagreb was nevertheless crucial to the political and cul-
tural development of the Croats, one of the many small Eastern European
peoples that had experienced a national revival in the nineteenth century.

'This is a revised and expanded version of a paper delivered at the American Historical Asso-
ciation convention in Washington, D. C, on December 30, 1980.
120 KROKAR

It is interesting that the years around the turn of the century, so eventful in
Vienna, were as eventful in Zagreb, at least for the future of Croatian politics
and culture. Major political developments and a cultural flowering known as
the Croatian Moderna [modernity] went hand in hand. Indeed, this Moderna
was more than a literary movement. A conscious revolt of Croatia's young
against their fathers' generation, of the mladi against the stari, it embraced
painting, sculpture, architecture, and even politics in addition to literature.2
And, despite obvious differences owing to local conditions, there were re-
markable similarities between what was happening in turn-of-the-century
Vienna and what was going on in Zagreb of the Moderna.
It is intended here to explore some of those similarities, to bring together
coherently material already found in secondary works, many of them written
in Croatian. This is done, however, with only one eye on Zagreb, while the
other is fixed on cultural and political trends in Vienna. On the surface, it is
perhaps surprising that some Croatian or other Yugoslav scholar has not sys-
tematically explored the numerous similarities between turn-of-the-century
Zagreb and Vienna, since it seems self-evident that the capital of a country
should exert considerable intellectual influence on a provincial city. Yet
even before the dissolution of the Monarchy, and understandably so since,
the Croats have tended to concentrate on establishing the validity of their na-
tional movement and institutions and on describing the obstacles placed in
their way by "oppressive" Vienna and Budapest. Furthermore, no historian
of Vienna has yet systematically traced the echoes of Viennese intellectual
and cultural movements in one of the empire's provincial cities. While there
is no claim to having completed such a systematic and thorough examination
of the problem, this article will at least show that, in the last two decades of
the Habsburg Empire's existence, Vienna decisively influenced the intellec-
tual, political, and cultural life of Zagreb.
Before examining some of the similarities between the two cities, how-
ever, it would perhaps be wise to observe a few of the more striking differ-
ences, the most obvious of which was size. Zagreb was not merely a
provincial Habsburg city, it was a small provincial city. Although the largest
city in Croatia, it remained small compared even to other provincial centers.
Having around twenty thousand people in the Empire's first post-Ausgleich
2
The best recent survey of the Moderna in its literary and nonliterary aspects is Slavko
Goldstein et al., Povijest hrvatske knjilevnosti [History of Croatian Literature], vol. V,
Miroslav Sicel, Knjizevnost Moderne [Literature of the Moderna], (Zagreb: Liber and Mladost,
1978). A good standard survey also appears in Antun Barac, Jugoslavenska knjiievnost
[Yugoslav Literature], 3rded. (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1963), pp. 218-236. An English-lan-
guage translation of the latter, sponsored by the Joint Committee on Eastern Europe of the Amer-
ican Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, is available under
the title, A History of Yugoslav Literature.
 NATIONAL CULTURAL CENTERS 121

census in 1869, Zagreb by 1900 had grown to a little under 58,000 inhabi-
tants. In the same years, Prague grew from around 160,000 to over 500,000
people; Vienna, from around 600,000 to nearly 1,700,000. In 1900 Cracow,
relatively stagnant in population, was still somewhat larger than Zagreb,
having grown between 1869 and 1900 from around fifty thousand to 91,000
people. 3
The provincialism of turn-of-the-century Zagreb was apparent to its inhab-
itants, even—or perhaps especially—to those who made it the center of
Croatian culture. The foremost Croatian literary critic of the era, Antun Gus-
tav Mato§, had been raised in Zagreb but, after deserting from the Habsburg
army, had lived in Belgrade, Geneva, and Paris. While living abroad he
risked three dangerous secret trips back to Zagreb and returned there finally
in 1908 immediately after his pardon for desertion.4 Yet he had this to say
about his own city in a 1912 article published in Zagreb's most prominent
newspaper:

When I was unable to stay in the city . . . I longed for Zagreb . . . as a prisoner
longs for freedom. . . . Now Zagreb is rather boring to me. That's entirely natu-
ral. After Paris, and even after Geneva and Belgrade, Zagreb is the provinces
and even worse! It is possible to live in a village and in a metropolis. Zagreb is
not a village and it's not a metropolis either, and because of that it is so boring,
so overwhelmingly boring that here people even kill themselves because of
boredom.5

Zagreb remained provincial, at least in part because the city was only
slightly touched by the industrialization that had already transformed Vienna
and Prague. Zagreb was largely an administrative city, its working popula-
tion dominated by bureaucrats who staffed the governmental offices of the
3
For the 1869 figures for Vienna, Prague, and Cracow, see Statistisches Jahrbuch fur das
Jahr 1870. Herausgegeben von der K. K. statistischen Central-Commission (Vienna: K. K.
Hof-undStaatsdruckerei, 1872), pp. 7, 10, 13. For the 1900 figures for Vienna and Cracow, see
Osterreichisches statistisches Handbuchfiir die im Reichsrate vertretenen Konigreiche und
Lander. Herausgegeben von der K. K. statistischen Zentralkommission, vol. XX (1901)
(Vienna: VerlagderK. K. statistischen Zentralkommission, 1902), p. 6. For the 1869 and 1900
figures for Zagreb, see Jaroslav Sidak et al., Povijest hrvatskog naroda g. 1860-1914 [History
of the Croatian People, 1860-1914] (Zagreb: Skolskaknjiga, 1968), p. 320, table 2. Becauseof
boundary changes not reflected in the published statistics, the figure for Prague's population in
1900 has been taken from Josef Jan&Sek, Mali dljiny Prahy [Short History of Prague] (Prague:
Orbis, 1967), p. 342, unnumbered graph.
4
5icel, Knjiievnost Moderne, pp. 164, 166.
5
"Zagreb i Zagrebi" [Zagreb and Zagrebs], in Vlatko Pavletid et al., eds., Pet stoljeia
hrvatske knjiievnosti [Five Centuries of Croatian Literature], vol. LXVI, Antun Gustav MaloS,
III: Kritike, eseji, sludije i Hand, polemike, putopisi.feljtoni i impresije [AntunGustav MatoS,
III: Reviews, Essays, Studies and Articles, Polemics, Travelogues, Feuilletons and Impres-
sions], Dragutin Tadijanovif and Marijan Matkovic', eds. (Zagreb: MaticaHrvatska and Zora,
1967), p. 375.
122 KROKAR

Croatian Kingdom. The city's industrial base was still small; and, in this, Za-
greb was an accurate reflector of conditions throughout the Kingdom of
Croatia. There, in 1900, nearly 85% of the population were still dependent
on agriculture for their living and less than 7% owed their livelihoods to in-
dustry and crafts.6
Despite these demographic and economic differences between Zagreb and
Vienna, the political and cultural developments in both cities still exhibited
uncanny similarities. In fact, the difference in size between the two cities un-
doubtedly contributed to Zagreb's continued dependence on Vienna. By
1900 the political and cultural institutions of Zagreb had developed suffi-
ciently so that the Croats were no longer an almost totally illiterate, power-
less people in danger of assimilation by more numerous, more powerful, and
more cultured neighbors. They had not yet developed sufficiently, however,
to enable certain spheres of Croatian culture to stand on their own and to re-
ject powerful cultural influences emanating from the nearby capital.
Thus Zagreb's painters, for example, with little local institutional support,
still closely followed—one might even say aped—events in Vienna. The
handful of painters in Zagreb, almost all trained in the academic tradition in
Vienna and Munich, managed to stage their very first independent exhibition
only in 1894 and formed an independent artists' organization the next year.
Yet just a few years later in 1898, within a year of the Viennese Secession,
they proclaimed their own Secession in Zagreb, joining, again like their
Viennese compatriots, with younger literary men in proclaiming their new
program. Yet the depth of these academic-turned-Secessionist painters' un-
derstanding of and commitment to the new artistic ideas is questionable. The
leader in the effort to establish an independent artists' organization in 1895
was Vlaho Bukovac, who also was one of those declaring the Croatian Seces-
sion. His own paintings, however, display numerous styles; and his most
famous work, Hrvatski narodni preporod [The Croatian National Renais-
sance] , completed for the new National Theater in Zagreb in 1896, was a tra-
ditional historical allegory in academic style. Eclecticism in style rather than
consistency, much less a Secessionist consistency, was a hallmark of all of
Zagreb's Secessionist painters.7
Before observing in detail some of the Viennese influences on other
spheres of life in turn-of-the-century Zagreb, one more preliminary question
remains for consideration. Why was a Transleithanian city like Zagreb so
6
Sidaketal.,Povijesthrvatskognaroda, p. 321, table3.
'Gjuro Szabo, Start Zagreb [Old Zagreb] (Zagreb: Knjtiara Vlasic" i Horvat, 1941), p. 244;
Zvane Crnja, Kulturna historija Hrvatske: Ideje, lilnosti, djela [Cultural History of Croatia:
Ideas, Personalities, Works] (Zagreb: Epoha, 1965), p. 532; Sicel, Knjiievnost Moderne, pp.
23-29.
 NATIONAL CULTURAL CENTERS 123

much under the influence of Vienna and not of Budapest? At the most basic
level, it was a matter of proximity. Zagreb, only some fifteen miles from the
border with the Cisleithanian province of Carniola, was much closer to
Vienna than to Budapest. Before the advent of the railroad it had always been
easier to reach Vienna; even when railroads were built, Zagreb's connection
with Vienna had been finished nearly ten years before the line to Budapest.8
Politics, too, was a link between Zagreb, the Croatian capital, and Vienna,
the imperial one. An attempt by Zagreb's politicians to play off political cir-
cles in Vienna against those of Budapest, to the advantage of Croatia, was a
constant in local politics. Since 1867 dissatisfaction with rule from Budapest
caused a swing in sentiment toward Vienna. Besides, even under dualism the
political link with Vienna was certainly not broken: the ultimate legislative
authority might lie in the Hungarian parliament in Budapest, but ultimate ex-
ecutive authority still lay with the king-emperor in Vienna.
Additionally, education provided a link between Croatia and Zagreb on
the one hand, and Cisleithania and Vienna on the other. The University of
Graz, in Styria right across the border from Croatia, had long been an educa-
tional mecca for Croats. The opening of a university in Zagreb in 1875 did
not end for Croatian students the attraction of Cisleithanian universities, par-
ticularly of the world-renowned University of Vienna. Austrian universities
not only enjoyed greater prestige than the universities in Zagreb and Buda-
pest; they also provided education in German, a world language offering an
entre'e to wider European culture. The Croatian students educated in these
Austrian universities inevitably influenced Zagreb's cultural and intellectual
life. If they returned to Croatia, they tended to settle, if at all possible, in
Zagreb, the only real cultural center in their homeland. Moreover, while still
in Austria, these students often remained in contact with, and even partici-
pated in, the politics and culture of the Croatian capital. Indeed, the Croatian
Moderna can be said to have begun in May 1895 with a call for a general
meeting of Croatian youth, a call issued by student societies in four univer-
sity cities: Zagreb and the three Austrian cities of Vienna, Graz, and Inns-
bruck.9 Only a few months later, in October 1895, an event occurred that was
to prove momentous for the further course of the Moderna, an event that,
incidentally, was to strengthen Cisleithanian and Viennese educational, cul-
tural, intellectual, and political influences on Zagreb. A student demonstra-
tion, which occurred during Franz Joseph's visit to Zagreb for the dedication
of the new Croatian National Theater, resulted in the expulsion of many of

8
Miroslava Despot, Industrie gradjanske Hrvatske (1860-1873) [The Industry of Civil Croa-
tia (1860-1873)] (Zagreb: Institut za Historiju Radnickog Pokreta Hrvatske, 1970), pp. 29, 33.
'Sicel, KnjiievnostModerne, pp. 16-17.
124 KROKAR

the demonstrators from the University of Zagreb. Large numbers of the ex-
pellees moved to Vienna and Prague to continue their studies. There, by
means of student journals, manifestoes, and published programs, they be-
came involved in the initial stages of the Moderna movement; and, on their
return to Zagreb after finishing their studies, these Prague- and Vienna-
educated youths assumed leading roles in the movement in Zagreb.10
A more detailed look at developments in four fields—politics, literature,
architecture, and music—will afford a closer observation of the development
of Viennese influence on turn-of-the-century Zagreb and on the Croatian
Moderna. Of these, architecture was an area in which Zagreb's dependence
on Vienna was still quite clear. That is not the case for politics, literature, and
music, fields in which the Croats had been following their own line of devel-
opment for years, but the similarities even here are striking.
In Croatian politics the year 1903 marks a significant turning point. In that
year, in the face of a united opposition and of demonstrations throughout
Croatia, the hated Magyar-supported ban (or governor), KSroly Khuen-
HedevaYy, who had held the highest executive position in Croatia for twenty
years, left office. His resignation, long-desired by all but the most pro-
Magyar Croats, was owing not to the popular opposition to him, but to his
appointment by Franz Joseph as minister-president of Hungary. The years
immediately after Khuen's departure saw the rise in Croatia of a number of
new political parties, including one of the better-known Croatian political
groupings, the Croato-Serbian Coalition, dedicated to co-operation between
Croatia's Croatian majority and Serbian minority and, initially, to a democ-
ratization of Croatian political life. There is no occasion here to explain the
failure of the coalition or the complex twists and turns of Croatian politics
between 1903 and 1914. Suffice it to note that the era was one of parliamen-
tary obstructionism, of repeated parliamentary dissolutions, and of eventual
parliamentary paralysis and growing political embitterment. Increasingly,
politics was conducted in the streets, through demonstrations, general
strikes, and riots. And this, in spite of the different focus of the issues in
Vienna and Zagreb, is the most striking similarity between the political expe-
riences of the two cities.
Zagreb was no stranger to demonstrations and riots before 1903. But after
that date they were more numerous, attracted larger numbers of people, and
continued over a longer period of time than ever before." In the case of

'"Ibid., pp. n-23;Sidakela\.,Povijesthrvatskognaroda, pp. 152-155.

"Historically notable demonstrations in Zagreb before 1903 had occurred in May 1845 dur-
ing an electoral campaign, in 1883 as a protest against Magyar inscriptions on government
buildings, and in 1895 when the student participants were expelled from the university. On these
occasions, however, the resort to the streets ceased after a short while. After 1903, demonstra-
tions became a regular occurrence in Zagreb.
 NATIONAL CULTURAL CENTERS 125

demonstrations directed by one of the many political parties, the goal of

street politics was generally a return to a constitutional sabor, or parliament,
free from manipulation by the Hungarian government in Budapest. But once
a resort to the streets had become institutionalized, as it were, the way was
open for other developments more ominous for the prospect of continued
parliamentary government. As early as November 1906, when the sabor did
manage to reach the point of convening, it had to depend on a demonstration
to ensure the commencement of its work. A large crowd, composed mostly
of Social Democrats, filled the square in front of the sabor chamber. They
were there to escort in the deputies and to forestall the plans of the right-wing
nationalist Dr. Josip Frank, who had threatened to fill the square with his own
supporters in order to keep the deputies from entering the chamber and open-
ing the session.12 Two years later there were clashes, beginning in Zagreb but
spreading to other Croatian cities, between right- and left-wing paramilitary
groups, Dr. Frank's Croatian Legion and the Social Democrats' Red
Guard.l3 In June and again in October of 1912, Zagreb witnessed two unsuc-
cessful attempts by students to assassinate Count Slavko Cuvaj, the Royal
Commissioner sent by Budapest to govern Croatia by decree. In the summer
of 1913 there was yet another unsuccessful attempt at assassination; this time
the new ban, Baron Ivo Skerletz, was the intended victim. That same sum-
mer, Zagreb police arrested yet another student who admitted he was plan-
ning to shoot Franz Ferdinand, the heir-apparent.l4
These attempts at assassination highlight yet another similarity between
Zagreb and Vienna. This was the conscious rejection by young people of the
values, beliefs, and traditions of the older generation. The political and cul-
tural elite in Zagreb, much smaller of course than Vienna's elite, was never-
theless as committed as the latter to a high-Victorian liberalism. In the 1870s,
under Ban Ivan Ma2uranic\ Zagreb's politicians had instituted a program of
liberal reforms similar to those passed in Vienna and Budapest.15 From the
1870s until the very end of the Habsburg Monarchy, the same social group
responsible for enacting these reforms—primarily governmental employees
and members of the free professions—continued to control Croatian politics
because of the province's restrictive electoral law. In 1906 only 1.8% of
Croatia's population had the right to vote, and the electoral reform of 1910
l2
David J. Fulton, "Croatian Social Democracy and the National Question 1903-1914" (un-
published doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, 1974), pp. 108-110.
l3
lbid., pp. 145-146.
'""Vladimir Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), pp. 262-
276.
"On the reforms, see James P. Krokar, "Liberal Reform in Croatia, 1872-75: The Begin-
nings of Modern Croatia under Ban Ivan Maiuranid" (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indi-
ana University, 1980).
126 KROKAR

raised the figure to only 8.8%.16 From 1883 to 1903, it is true, Croatian poli-
tics had been dominated by Ban Khuen-H6deva"ry, who had manipulated par-
liamentary politics in favor of Budapest. Even while Khuen was ban,
however, the forms—if not the spirit—of liberalism were maintained in
Croatia, so that all post-Khuen Croatian political parties, whether represen-
tative of the older generation or of the more radical new one, were still com-
mitted to parliamentarism.
In Croatian politics the conscious rejection by the young of the political
sterility of their fathers' generation had not at first taken on a revolutionary
coloration. In 1897 the Progressive Youth group, led by former students edu-
cated mostly in Prague—students who had been expelled from the University
of Zagreb after the 1895 demonstration—began openly and repeatedly to re-
ject the programs of the older generation of politicians in Croatia. They urged
instead the cooperation of Serbs and Croats, economic and educational re-
forms for the masses, and a policy of political realism a la Masaryk. The Pro-
gressive Youth were still committed to parliamentarism.17 A commitment by
the young to parliamentary politics was, however, no longer general by the
eve of the First World War. Three of the four would-be Zagreb assassins
were students who had, or seem to have wanted to have, connections with
one or another of the numerous self-styled revolutionary youth groups that
sprang up in the South Slavic provinces of the Empire immediately preceding
the war.18
This conscious rejection of the older generation was apparent, too, in
Croatian literature. In this field, as well as in politics, the year 1903 can be
considered a turning point. In that year, the triumph of the new movement in
Croatian literature, the Moderna, was signalled by the demise of the oldest
Croatian literary magazine, Vijenac [The Wreath], the organ for over forty
years of the older, realist generation of writers. After a number of short-lived
successors, Vijenac was eventually replaced as Croatia's premier literary
journal by the new movement's organ Savremenik [The Contemporary],
founded in 1906. The names of both the new movement and its main journal,
Modernity and The Contemporary, are indicative of the conscious break with
the older forms, ideas, and generation of Croatian literature.19
The era of the Moderna is that in which Croatian literature finally caught
up with general European literary trends. Its followers opened up Croatian
l6
Fulton, "Croatian Social Democracy," pp. 68,172. The size of the increased electorate is
put at only "around 6%" in§idaketal.,/ > ovi/esf hrvatskog naroda, p. 268.
17
Fulton, "Croatian Social Democracy,' 'pp. 13-14; Sidak et al., Povijest hrvatskog naroda,
pp. 152-155.
18
Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo, pp. 262-276.
"Sicel, Knjizevnost Moderne, pp. 56-82, especially pp. 71-74.
 NATIONAL CULTURAL CENTERS 127

literature to influences of contemporary trends from throughout the Conti-

nent. The Moderna, primarily because of Antun Gustav Mato§, its foremost
critic and one of its foremost writers, also marked the victory in Croatia of
European standards of literary criticism. After MatoS and the Moderna, poor
literature could no longer be justified in Zagreb solely because it was written
in Croatian by a Croatian writer.
The novelists and poets of the Moderna followed various literary currents
and were united only by their rejection of the earlier generation.20 The move-
ment presents no clear-cut picture of an entire young literary generation turn-
ing inward in rejection of the world in order to discover the self. It included
many writers who joined the attack on the earlier Croatian realists because of
the latter's moralism, provincialism, and lack of interest in Croatia's press-
ing social problems, but who themselves favored a'' more realistic'' realism.
In particular, those writers of the Moderna who after the 1895 demonstration
had studied in Prague and had come under Masaryk's influence were expo-
nents of a literature of commitment that would help solve Croatia's political
and social problems.21
Within the Moderna, however, there were also self-proclaimed symbol-
ists and decadents, followers of the Seccession and devotees of art for art's
sake who primarily extolled the freedom of individual artistic expression.
This strain within the Moderna, strongest among those who had studied in
Vienna after the 1895 demonstration, preferred to probe the psychology of
the individual rather than to exhort the Croatian nation to continue its struggle
against the Teuton and the Magyar.22 Significantly, too, those among the
Croatian writers who shared their Viennese contemporaries' concern with
man's inner, psychological life also shared with them one other attribute, a
similar social background.23 They, too, were the children of the elite, the
Croatian bourgeois and bureaucratic elite; and their literary revolt was, like
that of their Viennese colleagues, a rejection as well of the liberal milieu in
which they had grown up.
Both camps within the Moderna, again like their Viennese contempo-
raries, looked outside of Central Europe for their literary models, particu-
larly to France. But, whether concerned with man's psychology or with
social action, those who rejected Germanic influence for that of Paris seldom
went directly to the source. Rather, they relied on German—and the increas-
ing number of Croatian and Serbian—translations of the originals or derived
20
lbid., pp. 9-10; Barac, Jugoslavenska knjiievnost, pp. 220-222.
21
On one of the most prominent men in this group, the critic Milan Marjanovic', see Sice!,
Knjiievnost Moderne, pp. 104-108. See also, ibid., p. 74.
22
One of the most consistent exponents of this position was the critic Branimir Livadif; ibid.,
pp. 114-118, as well as p. 74.
23
Barac, Jugoslavenska knjizevnost, p. 220.
128 KROKAR

their enthusiasm for things French through the medium of Francophile

Viennese writers.24 The critic Antun Gustav Mates', fluent in French and a
resident of Paris for five years, was a rarity. Much more common was the
case of Silvije Strahimir Kranjc'evic, one of the older generation of writers
who approved of, and was in turn accepted by, the younger generation of the
Moderna. Kranjfievic did not know French and read French authors in Croa-
tian or German translation; he even read French lyric poetry in German.25
The very rejection by turn-of-the-century Croatian writers of Central Europe
in favor of Paris was itself a reflection, as well as a rejection, of Vienna.
Even more clearly than literature, however, the architecture of turn-of-
the-century Zagreb reflects the dominance of Viennese currents. Although
still a small city in 1900, Zagreb had more than doubled its population be-
tween the Ausgleich and the turn of the century. New people meant an expan-
sion of the existing city limits. Situated at the foot of the low hills on the edge
of the Sava River plain, only a few miles north of the river itself, Zagreb be-
gan expanding in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Some residential
areas spread northward, further into the hills. But most of the growth oc-
curred on the plain that stretched southward toward the Sava. There an en-
tirely new quarter of the city grew up, built in the historic styles dominant
throughout Europe in the late nineteenth century, but nowhere as dominant
as in Vienna. As on the Ringstrasse, the principal buildings in this new quar-
ter of Zagreb were designed to house the offices of governmental and cultural
institutions and were grouped around or in parks. Interspersed with public
buildings such as those of the university, the Croatian ministry of justice, the
National Theater, and the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences were the
new city homes of the Croatian nobility and apartment buildings for the well-
to-do bourgeoisie.26
The dominant style of these new buildings was nineteenth-century Renais-
sance, fitting, no doubt, for the cultural capital of one of the Eastern Eu-
ropean peoples who experienced their national rebirth in that century.27 The
monuments to this rebirth, however, were not designed by Croats but by non-
local architects, either by firms from Vienna, Budapest, or even Berlin, or by
the very prolific Hermann Bolle, an Austrian architect who settled in Zagreb.
"Ugly and expensive . . . architectural monsters," according to one recent
commentator, many of these buildings sacrificed interior harmony and prac-

24
Sicel, KnjiievnostModerne, pp. 14, 23.
25
Antun Barac, "Literarne paralele," [Literary Parallels], in his Knjiievnost i narod
(Rasprave i eseji) [Literature and the People (Articles and Essays)] (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska,
1941), p. 173.
26
Szabo, StariZagreb, pp. 215-217, 219-222, 224-225, 236-241.
21
Ibid., pp 215-216, 219, 221, 224, 236.
 NATIONAL CULTURAL CENTERS 129

ticality in favor of richly and eclectically ornamented facades.28 Yet this his-
torical style of Zagreb's public buildings and new city residences remained
desirable because of its connotations of prestige. Indeed, it was even adapted
to simple domestic architecture, an adaptation that shows up clearly in the
architecture of the modest middle-class homes built in the new suburbs in the
hills north of the old city. Many of these bourgeois homes, even plain one-
story cottages, sprouted a single, ungainly—but prestigious—square tower
that often dwarfed the house itself.29
That Zagreb was closely following architectural currents in Vienna is
shown most clearly by the complete eclipse of the Renaissance style, shortly
before 1900, in favor of the local version of Secession architecture. An un-
sympathetic observer has described Zagreb Secession style as little more
than a mania for different types of decoration: useless Greek and Roman stat-
uary gave way to useless Indian and Egyptian statuary, while towers sud-
denly disappeared from new buildings, to be replaced by cupolas on
everything from corner drugstores to the new University Library.30 This new
style, too, was adapted to both domestic and public architecture, but the
clearest example of it is a public building, the Pavilion of Art (Umjetnidki
paviljon) erected in a park across from Zagreb's main railroad station in
1898.31 Whether Renaissance or Secessionist in style, however, all these
new structures in Zagreb, like those of the Ringstrasse in Vienna, were ex-
pressions of the local bourgeoisie's pride in what they had achieved. But, if
Vienna's charming Ringstrasse was derivative architecture, Zagreb's
equally charming, if smaller, new constructions were copies of the copies.
The one aspect of Zagreb's cultural life that at first glance seems not to
have been decisively influenced by turn-of-the-century Vienna is music.
Music in the Croatian capital seemed virtually immune to a revolt of the sons
against the fathers such as was evident in Vienna and in Croatian literature
and politics. Indeed, the one and only father of modern Croatian music, Ivan
Zajc, was still alive at the turn of the century. As he had since 1870, he con-
tinued to dominate Zagreb's musical scene until his death in December 1914.
A devotee of Italian music and particularly of Verdi, Zajc was the most pro-
lific Croatian musician of all times and a mentor to Zagreb's younger musical
generations. Throughout his career he remained true to the Italian musical
models of his youth, "As if," according to a modern Croatian critic, "the
far-reaching efforts and results of. .. Wagner,... Franck,... Mussorgsky,
28
Ruth Bajurin, "Architecture, Sculpture and Painting," in Francis H. Eterovich and
Christopher Spalatin, Croatia: Land, People, Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1964), p. 324.
29
Szabo, Stari Zagreb, pp. 229-230.
x
lbid., pp. 271-272.
31
Sicel, Knjizevnost Moderne, pp. 31, 33.
130 KROKAR

. . . [Richard] Strauss,. . . Debussy and others did not exist for him." 32 But,
although Croatian music at the turn of the century was not in step with the
latest Viennese musical developments, a few echoes of Vienna's musical life
did extend as far as Zagreb.
Despite his position as Croatia's first national composer, Zajc's back-
ground before his move to Zagreb in 1870 was highly cosmopolitan. Son of
a Czech military bandmaster, Zajc was born and reared in Rijeka, a city with
a mostly Italian and Croatian population ruled directly by the Magyars. Hav-
ing studied at the Milan Conservatory from 1850 to 1855—where he wrote
his first opera, in Italian—Zajc declined a position at La Scala to return to
Rijeka (Fiume). There he served for seven years as conductor and concert-
master of the local theater orchestra, while composing a large number of
works including his first staged opera, composed, as was his first, in Italian.
In 1862 Zajc moved to Vienna to further his career under the curiously hybrid
name of Giovanni von Zaytz. Finding a complete lack of interest in his op-
eras, he turned in 1863 to composing for the latest Viennese musical craze,
operetta. His very first work in this genre, although now forgotten, was a suc-
cess. In the next seven years he churned out seventeen more German-
language operettas and a number of Croatian choral works. The latter went
unperformed at the time, but the public and critical success of his operettas in
Vienna brought him to the attention of the Zagreb musical public.33
Invited to come to Zagreb in 1870 as director of a new Croatian opera the-
ater and head of the Conservatory of Zagreb's National Music Institute
[Narodni GlazbeniZavod], Zajc found a modest musical establishment. Be-
fore his arrival, Zagreb's musical life centered around touring Italian opera
companies and largely amateur productions put on by patriotic singing soci-
eties and the National Music Institute. The latter organization, founded in
1827 as the Musikverein, sponsored most of Zagreb' s publ ic concerts and, as
early as 1829, had organized the Conservatory to train both professional and
amateur musicians. Surviving through public benefactions, this society
achieved a firmer financial footing and official recognition only in 1861,
when the Croatian sabor provided it with a yearly subvention and changed its
name (long-since Croatianized as the Society of Friends of Music in Croatia
and Slavonia [Drustvo prijatelja glazbe u Hrvatskoj i Slavoniji]) to the Na-
tional Music Institute. Throughout the 1860s the Institute still staged only a
few performances a year, however, and it was able to add a regular course in

32
EncikIopedija Jugoslavije, s.v. "Zajc, Ivan," byJ. As. [Josip Andreis].
^Ibid.; Boiidar Sirola, Hrvatska umjetniika glazba [Croatian Art Music] (Zagreb: Matica
Hrvatska, 1942), pp. 140-143; Eric Blom, ed., Grove's Dictionary ofMusk and Musicians, 5th
ed. (London: MacmillanandCo., 1954), IX, 395;The International Cyclopedia of Music and
Musicians, 9th ed., s.v. "Zaytz, Giovanni von."
 NATIONAL CULTURAL CENTERS 131

piano to the curriculum of its conservatory only in 1865. The same year it had
provided funds for the music society, the sabor had also established a Croat-
ian National Theater and charged its directors with the eventual establish-
ment of a "South Slav opera." During the sixties, however, the theater never
succeeded in staging anything more ambitious than operettas.34
Zajc's arrival in Zagreb in 1870 marked the beginning of professionaliza-
tion of music in Zagreb. His first year in the city saw the beginning of a regu-
lar opera theater, as a branch of the Croatian National Theater, with fifteen
performances in the first ten-week season. To be sure, ten of these works
were operettas, three were musical melodramas, and only two were operas.
Zajc, moreover, had composed nearly half the works: five of the operettas
and both operas.35 But he had successfully launched a Croatian-language op-
era theater.36 Moreover, his dominance of thefirstyear's bill was a presage of
the dominance in the field of Croatian musical composition that this prolific
composer was to exert until his death. Although he ceased to direct the opera
theater in 1889, he continued as head of the Conservatory and as a teacher of
voice until 1908, positions that allowed him to influence decisively the
younger generation of Croatian musicians who came to the fore at the turn of
the century.37 From both the conductor's podium and the teacher's desk he
insisted on, and got, professional standards of performance.
Perhaps it was awareness of Zajc's great contributions that forestalled any
revolt against him during his lifetime. Zagreb's turn-of-the-century musi-
cians and public certainly held his musical talents in higher esteem than their
descendants. 38 Perhaps, though, the weakness of Zagreb's musical in-
frastructure, despite the recent advances, contributed to the strikingly unre-
bellious mood of Zagreb's turn-of-the-century musicians. To the very eve of
the war, few Croatian composers other than Zajc could earn a living solely
from music. A survey of the biographies of Croatia's pre-war composers
M
Sirola, Hrvatska umjetniika gtazba, pp. 65-66, 114-116, 118-119.
"Hrvatsko narodno kazaliSte, Sto godina opere 1870171-1970171 [A Hundred Years of Op-
era, 1870/71-1970/71] (Zagreb: Grafi£ki Zavod Hrvatske, 1971), unpaginated (citation comes
from second page of book's final section, which is entitled "Glazbeni repertoar HNK").
"Through his compositions, Zajc exponentially increased the Croatian-language operatic
repertoire, but he did not write the first Croatian opera. That distinction belongs to Vatroslav
Lisinski, a talented musical amateur, whose opera Ljubav i zloba [Love and Malice] was first
performed in 1846. Zajc was, however, the first to present foreign operas in Zagreb in Croatian
translation, beginning with Verdi's Troubadour in 1871. Sirola, Hrvatska umjetniika glazba,
pp. 67-71; Sto godina opere, unpaginated (citation comes from third page of the introduction by
Aleksander Reiching).
"Sirola, Hrvatska umjetniika glazba, pp. 143-147. Cf., in English, Fedor Kabalin,
"Music," in Eterovich and Spalatin, Croatia, pp. 285-287.
38
Of his twelve hundred compositions, only his 1876 opera Nikola Subii Zrinski, a patriotic
potboiler, continues to be performed, "more for patriotic reasons than for intrinsic musical
value" according to Kabalin. "Music," p. 285.
132 KROKAR

shows that most of them worked full-time in another field; in their ranks were
many primary- and secondary-school teachers and clergymen and even a
lawyer, a philologist, and a prominent historian.39 Moreover, Zagreb's musi-
cal life was still excessively dependent on choral societies and the opera
house, to the detriment of instrumental music; a philharmonic orchestra was
not even organized until 1920, and even then its performances were irregular
at first.40 Even the opera theater, the proudest achievement of the Zajc era,
was not without its difficulties. For financial and political reasons, the opera
was closed completely from 1889 to 1894, and again from 1902 to 1909.41
Even when operas were being staged, however, the relatively modest num-
ber of productions in Zagreb were not enough to employ all of the city's
singing talent. There was a steady flow of singers out of the city, evidenced
by the relatively large number of internationally famous singers who made
careers in Europe and America after starting in provincial Zagreb.42
The smallness of Zagreb and the modesty of its musical establishment—
coupled with its nearness to Vienna—undoubtedly contributed, too, to the
fact that by 1914 Zagreb was probably influenced more significantly, partic-
ularly in public taste, by Vienna and its world-famous music than it had been
in 1870 when the Italophile Zajc arrived in the Croatian capital. With the es-
tablishment of its own opera, Zagreb lost its direct link to Italian musical in-
fluence, the touring Italian opera companies. And even as early as 1870 the
Italophile Croatian music lovers had invited the Italophile Zajc to their city
only after he had proved successful in writing for the Viennese public. De-
spite unsuccessful efforts to raise the level of its taste, as it were, the Zagreb
public, too, showed a marked preference for that quintessentially Viennese
musical product, the operetta. It was, after all, as an operettist that Zajc first
came to Zagreb's attention; in fact, during the periods in which its opera
house was closed, operettas were still regularly performed in Zagreb and
Zajc returned to writing them. If his position was threatened by anyone after
the turn of the century, it was by Franz Lehdr, whose operettas were all the
rage among Zagreb's music lovers.43
Although turn-of-the-century musicians did not join their literary cousins
in a revolt against their fathers, they were not totally immune to the new
trends from the empire's capital either. SreCko Albini, one of Zagreb's
younger composers, collaborated with a group of young painters and writers
39
§irola, Hrvatska umjetniika glazba, pp. 175-210. The historian was Vjekoslav Klai£, a pro-
fessor at Zagreb University and author of a six-volume history of the Croats.
"°Kabalin, "Music," 297-298; Sirola, Hrvatska umjetniika glazba, pp. 174-175.
"Sto godina opere, unpaginated (citation comes from the fourth page of the introduction by
Aleksander Reiching).
"ibid., unpaginated (citation comes from the first four pages of the section entitled
"Zagrebaiki operni umjetnici na inozemnim pozornicima").
43
Sirola, Hrvatska umjetniika glazba, pp. 124,126, 144,222.
 NATIONAL CULTURAL CENTERS 133

in producing the journal Zivot [Life], an avowedly Secessionist artistic

magazine that appeared between 1899 and 1901.M Albini's further career,
however, far from being a rebellion against the father of Croatian music, was
almost a carbon copy of Zajc's. When the opera was closed down in 1902, a
year after Zivot ceased publication, Albini, a la Zajc, went to Vienna and be-
gan composing operettas. When Zagreb's opera theater reopened in 1909,
Albini assumed its directorship on the strength of his relatively successful
career in Vienna.45 The influence of Vienna was clear as well on the first
major Croatian work that broke with Zajc's musical conceptions, Blagoje
Bersa's opera Oganj [The Fire], which had its premiere in Zagreb in 1911.
Bersa had deliberately left Zagreb to study at the Vienna Conservatory and
composed his opera in Vienna between 1905 and 1907.46 Although Zajc, the
grand old man of Croatian music, kept his eyes fixed firmly toward Italy,
even he could not prevent Zagreb's modest musical establishment from be-
ing influenced by the musical metropolis to the North.
As this survey has shown, the relationship between Zagreb and Vienna at
the turn of the twentieth century was undoubtedly a complex one; and, except
for the case of architecture, one would not want to claim that the similarities
were owing solely to outright imitation of Vienna by Zagreb. The parallels,
however, are striking and worthy of further study. In politics, literature, and
architecture, Zagreb saw the same conscious revolt of the sons against the
fathers that Vienna did; only Zagreb's musicians seemed immune to the
mood of rebelliousness. In politics, the Croatian capital saw some of the
same disillusionment with parliamentarism that was evident in Vienna. In
literature, Zagreb's writers followed the lead of their Viennese contempo-
raries in looking to Paris for their literary models; and many, although not all,
of them also shared the Viennese writers' preoccupation with the individ-
ual's inner life and a tendency to exalt art for art's sake. In architecture, Za-
greb's builders continued to ape Vienna's dominant architectural styles.
Even in music, echoes of Viennese influence can be found in the public's
captivation with operettas and a certain deference to Vienna's judgment of
musical worth. Perhaps by the eve of the First World War, the fabric of the
Habsburg Empire had reached such a stage of disintegration—in provincial
cities as well as in Vienna—that the war provided merely the final pressure
needed to rend it into its constituent parts. Then again, maybe the political,
intellectual, and cultural leaders of at least some of these constituent parts
were not yet aware that they belonged to only a portion of a larger whole.

De Paul University JAMES P. KROKAR

•"Sicel, KnjiievnostModerne, pp. 24-25.

45
§irola, Hrvatska umjetnUka glazba, p. 200.
A6
lbid., p. 256; Sicel, Knjiievnost Moderne, p. 34.