The Fiume Crisis

Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire

Dominique Kirchner Reill

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674249691
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts

Recasting the birth of fascism, nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I, Dominique Kirchner Reill recounts how the people of Fiume tried to recreate empire in the guise of the nation. The Fiume Crisis recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia) generated an international crisis.In 1919 the multicultural former Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces of the flamboyant poet-soldier Gabriele D'Annunzio, who aimed to annex the territory to Italy and became an inspiration to Mussolini. Many local Italians supported the effort, nurturing a standard tale of nationalist fanaticism. However, Dominique Kirchner Reill shows that practical realities, not nationalist ideals, were in the driver's seat. Support for annexation was largely a result of the daily frustrations of life in a "ghost state" set adrift by the fall of the empire. D'Annunzio's ideology and proto-fascist charisma notwithstanding, what the people of Fiume wanted was prosperity, which they associated with the autonomy they had enjoyed under Habsburg sovereignty. In these twilight years between the world that was and the world that would be, many across the former empire sought to restore the familiar forms of governance that once supported them. To the extent that they turned to nation-states, it was not out of zeal for nationalist self-determination but in the hope that these states would restore the benefits of cosmopolitan empire.Against the too-smooth narrative of postwar nationalism, The Fiume Crisis demonstrates the endurance of the imperial imagination and carves out an essential place for history from below.

1

Concealing Histories

The Different Fiume Stories

Some stories are just too good not to tell. And Fiume after World War I is one of them. It was a diplomatic debacle that paralyzed the Paris Peace Conference and led indirectly to Japan holding a mandate over part of mainland China. It helped cause the collapse of two Italian governments. It was one of the first places in Catholic Europe to give women the right to vote, not to mention having open homosexuals in charge of military units. Pirates procured food when supplies ran low. Anarcho-syndicalists helped write the city’s new constitution. Celebrated artists and scientists came to pay their homage to the city’s fight against the Great Powers. Cocaine flowed freely among those with the money to pay for it. It all ended with a “Christmas War” in which very few died. And it marked what many see as the birth of charismatic fascism. Unsurprisingly, many historians of interwar Europe use the Fiume Crisis to spice up their narratives. Who can blame them? After all, the spice is real, although much of it was created to keep Fiume in the news in the first place.

The story everyone loves to tell has three different beginnings, depending on which version is being told. The diplomatic debacle story begins in the New York offices of Woodrow Wilson’s advisers before the war was even over. The journalistic fanfare and the women’s rights story begins in Fiume as soon as fighting ended in late October 1918. The fantastical proto-fascist adventure tale begins in September 1919 when Gabriele D’Annunzio made his entrance. The different start dates indicate the separate morals of each story, the reasons we are still telling them. As such, perhaps it is best to tell them separately, in the order of their different beginnings, so that we can see what is there and what is missing.

Story One: The Diplomatic Debacle and Wilson’s Plans for Europe

It is hard to say how much Woodrow Wilson knew about Fiume before he started drafting the Fourteen Points in December 1917. Though he had been to Europe before, he was more drawn to the imposing quads of medieval Oxbridge colleges than to the grit of modern Mediterranean port life. As a voracious reader deeply concerned with America’s position in the world, however, he probably noticed that a place called Fiume kept being discussed in economic circles. Before 1917, when Fiume appeared in the New York Times, it was usually in pieces about international economic competition and transatlantic immigration. In 1883, for example, readers learned that there was “considerable gossip” about shipments of crude oil in barrels to “Fiume, in the Adriatic,” as previously transporting oil that way had seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.¹ In 1896, Wilson’s eye might have caught his surname in a Fiume story announcing that “the Wilson Line steamship Vasco” had arrived in New York from “Fiume, Austria,” carrying well over two thousand tons of beet sugar.² In 1904, more than one person thumbing through the dailies probably paused at the headline “Japan Orders Torpedoes in Italy.” Reading further, Americans probably felt surprise upon learning that “Japan has sent to Fiume three experts to watch the construction of torpedoes which are to be delivered to the Japanese Government in the next three years.”³ In 1905, an editorial informed all who would listen that Hungary was going to make Fiume its mass emigration port, guaranteeing to send to the United States “not less than 30,000 emigrants a year.”⁴ In 1910, Fiume’s role in moving emigrants across the Atlantic created a worldwide rate war, with the “the Austro-Hungarian Government” offering steamship lines a 20 percent discount if they made Fiume their port of call for shipping Europeans to the United States.⁵ The message of these articles and a slew of others could be summed up as follows: Fiume equals new industries, oil, steamships, agricultural export, a torpedo factory, a train hub, an emigration center, big state subsidies, and a money maker.

A careful reader might have noticed that the “where” of Fiume was hazy. Let us remember what those articles were conveying: Fiume was Austria’s beet sugar port; Japan sent experts to Fiume, in Italy, for its torpedoes; Hungary contracted with steamship companies promising thirty thousand emigrants out of Fiume a year; and the Austro-Hungarian government lowered the fares for transatlantic travel by 20 percent if you departed from Fiume. Was Fiume part of Austria, Italy, Hungary, or Austria-Hungary? The city was undoubtedly important for the world’s increasing globalized trade and immigration. But for someone like Wilson—elected president of Princeton University in 1902, governor of New Jersey in 1910, and president of the United States in 1912—there was probably no need to sort out these complexities. It was enough to know Fiume meant a bustling port, global industry, and plenty of emigrants.

In 1917, as Wilson was preparing what he described as the “objects of the war and the possible basis of a general peace,” not knowing where places were, especially busy industrial ports like Fiume, was not just foolish, it was dangerous.⁶ In November 1917 Wilson assembled a commission of “experts” in New York City, known as “the Inquiry,” to study all the territories that would potentially come under discussion at a peace conference, including Fiume.⁷ Wilson wanted “a guaranteed position” on where borders should be made. As he told his Inquiry advisers in December 1918, “Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it.”⁸ Six specialists were assigned to figure out where Fiume belonged, with another four weighing in when the Paris negotiations got rough.

Wilson’s experts included linguists, political scientists, historians, and lawyers. But for Fiume, they were mostly geographers. Fiume was as perplexing to international diplomats as it was to readers of the New York Times. This had not always been so. From the revolutions of 1848 until the restructuring of Habsburg lands in 1867, Fiume was administered by the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, even though much of the town’s government and trade were conducted in the lingua franca of Adriatic urban culture, Italian. This changed in 1867 when Hungary decided it wanted an industrial Mediterranean port to compete with Italy’s Venice and Austria’s Trieste. Through some rather devious diplomacy, Hungarian politicians and Fiume business elites convinced the Habsburg emperor, Franz Josef, to reinstate the corpus separatum, the city’s pre-Napoleonic status. The 7.56-square-mile city core, with its relatively deep-water port, would be removed from Croatian oversight and function as a semi-independent city-state governed by an Italian-language municipal council and a Hungarian governorship directly responsible to Budapest.⁹ Since then, Fiume existed outside the strictures of regional governance. It was administered by the city’s economic elite and directives from far-off Budapest. The Fiumara (called the Eneo in Italian, the Rječina in Croatian, and the Recsina in Hungarian)—a small river flowing to the Adriatic through a valley east of the city center—was designated as the border between Hungarian corpus separatum Fiume and the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia to its east. With the new designation, Hungarian money came flowing in, helping to set up railways, expand ports, install tram lines, and build state-of-the-art factories, refineries, institutes, banks, a hospital, and an emigration center. All that building and investment quickly attracted people from all over the Adriatic, as well as from central, eastern, and southeastern Europe.¹⁰ By 1890, over half of Fiume’s population had been born outside the city. Before Hungary reinstated the corpus separatum, Fiume was a smallish port town of seventeen thousand. Once separated from the lands, laws, and policies surrounding it and pumped full of money and opportunities from the metropole, Fiume became an international industrial port—the ninth largest in continental Europe—with triple the population (over fifty thousand) when Wilson’s experts began studying it.

Fiume’s rise might have been the result of economic, political, and administrative separation from the regions surrounding it, but this divide did not extend to daily life. Fiumian and Hungarian officials tried to bolster administrative separateness from the neighboring Croatian and Slovene countrysides by restricting the languages of trade and education to either Italian or Hungarian. Nonetheless, people of all tongues congregated, worked, and invested in the city, speaking the city’s local Fiumian (Italianate) dialect, standard Italian, Croatian, Slovene, Hungarian, German, Czech, Romanian, and Yiddish.¹¹ This cosmopolitan language culture was not the remnant of pre-1867 networks, but, like the rest of the city’s changes, the result of Fiume’s boom. And as Fiume’s population grew, so, too, did that of the cheaper outskirts in the Austrian-held lands to its west and the Croatian-held lands to its east. Most of these outskirts were agriculturally oriented suburbs that fed the industrial core with food and labor. But just across the Fiumara River to Fiume’s immediate east, Sušak—a satellite city of circa twelve thousand inhabitants—flourished under Croatian administrative guidance. In Sušak, Croatian laws and taxes ordered the city and Croatian served as the primary language of government and education. As the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia was also part of Hungary’s Crown of St. Stephen, movement—whether of peoples or goods—was very easy between the city, Fiume, and its satellite, Sušak.¹²

View of the Dead Canal, the small-boat harbor situated between Fiume and Sušak where the Fiumara emptied out into the Adriatic until the river’s outlet into the sea was diverted in the mid-nineteenth century. To the right, the wood emporium. In the distance, the bridge connecting the two towns with the Croatian hill town of Trsat above. To the left, Fiume’s riverbank, a site of informal regional trade.

Italian / Hungarian Fiume and Croatian Sušak grew in tandem, connected by two bridges and a railway line that went from Fiume through Sušak and on to Budapest via Zagreb. Port workers, fishermen, vegetable sellers, schoolchildren, and domestic servants crossed back and forth over these bridges every day. Affluent businessmen looking for the nicest views and the best topographies built their villas on both sides of the Fiumara. Industries, too, expanded their warehouses along both sides of the river.¹³ At the beginning of the twentieth century, Fiume was Hungary’s second-biggest capital producer (after Budapest), and Sušak was Croatia’s second biggest (after Zagreb).¹⁴ By 1918, when Wilson’s team of geographers were trying to decide where Fiume should sit on a map, they also had to decide whether Fiume should be treated as just the tightly defined entity the Hungarians had nurtured or as the center of a larger region that included Sušak and the other nearby villages that were growing year by year.

Wilson’s geographers consulted histories in English, German, French, and Italian; geographical analyses; and Austro-Hungarian statistical reports.¹⁵ The Inquiry also studied the treatises that the Italian and the Serb-Croat-Slovene delegations at the Paris Peace Conference had written to explain why Fiume should be given to Italy or to the newly forming Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, respectively. The Italian delegation wanted Fiume counted as a separate entity. The Serb-Croat-Slovene delegation wanted Fiume, Sušak, and the remaining hinterlands to be counted as one metropolitan area. Both delegations saw the dispute of how to define Fiume’s borders as intrinsically linked to which entity would have a greater “ethnic right” to claim its incorporation into its respective state. If Fiume was limited to just its core, without Sušak and the remaining hinterlands, then the majority of the population would be composed of those who spoke Italian as their mother tongue. If Fiume were extended to include Sušak and the hinterlands, there would be a majority of those who spoke Croatian or Slovene as their mother tongue. Along with academic specialists, Inquiry experts also commissioned journalists and American military personnel to travel to Fiume to assess the city’s infrastructure and local sentiments.¹⁶ The reports regularly noted that “nationality in Fiume is poorly defined,” with “numerous cases in which families were divided” between national loyalties. American on-the-ground reports echoed the opinion that Fiumians desired “a more or less autonomous form of government. The degree of autonomy proposed varies from the complete independence under international guarantee … to the limited form of a ‘free port’ under the mandatory of either Italy or Jugoslavia.”¹⁷

Geographically speaking, the Inquiry specialists spent an absurd amount of time explaining why they did not consider the Fiumara River a real divider between Fiume and Sušak. Multiple American reports insisted that Sušak was not a satellite city but a “mere suburb.” In these analyses, the Fiumara was downgraded from its status as a river that powered Fiume’s many mills to little more than a “creek.”¹⁸ Wilson’s chief territorial adviser in Paris, Professor Isaiah Bowman, probably explained the Fiume-Sušak issue to the president much as he did in the textbook he published while the final peace treaties were being signed: “Many persons talk loosely of Sušak as if it were another city separated from Fiume by a river. As a matter of fact, only a shallow brook separates the two; Sušak is as much part of Fiume as Brooklyn is a part of New York.”¹⁹ There is something amusing about comparing 1919 Brooklyn, with its two million inhabitants, to Sušak, with its circa twelve thousand, but the point was clear to all who participated in the US intelligence meetings: Fiume was not a singular, isolated place. It was the Manhattan to a larger, interdependent, metropolitan area, and Sušak was no Newark, but just another borough within a similar New York river-city system.

The Inquiry experts went through all the reasons New York Times readers would have assumed Fiume was part of Austria, Italy, Hungary, or Austria-Hungary and came up with the answer that, after the war to end all wars, it was in everyone’s best interest that Fiume should belong to none of those lands. The Inquiry assured Wilson (with reams of paper, maps, and statistics to back it up) that with the Habsburg Monarchy dissolved in October 1918, Fiume should be added to the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Just as they had argued in their preliminary reports, the six geographers assigned to the Fiume case said that nationality could not determine what state the city should be joined to, as no matter where Fiume sat on a map, many, if not most, of its inhabitants would be living in a national state with which they would not identify. Commercially, however, Fiume’s role in the viability of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was easy to understand. The Inquiry experts supported Wilson’s opinion that the Austrian-held port of Trie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on Names
• Maps
• Introduction: The Christmas of Blood
• 1. Concealing Histories: The Different Fiume Stories
• 2. Follow the Money: The Currency Debacle
• 3. Legal Ins and Outs: Crafting Local Sovereignty
• 4. Between City and State: The Contradictions of Citizenship
• 5. A Sense of Self: Propaganda and Nationalism
• Conclusion: When Empire Disappears
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Illustration Credits
• Index