Friedrich Engel-Janosi, Die Friedensaktion der Frau Hofrat Szeps-Zuckerkandl im Frühjahr 1917 — Summary

Engel-Janosi’s 1966 essay reconstructs Berta Szeps-Zuckerkandl’s peace feelers of spring 1917 as a small but revealing episode in the final crisis of the Habsburg Monarchy. Its starting point is the recognized dominance of the German alliance in Austria-Hungary’s late history:

Der Ablauf der großen Entscheidungen, der Verlauf der großen Krisen in der neueren Geschichte der Donaumonarchie ist bekannt, obwohl nur wenigen so gut bekannt wie Dir; und allen gewärtig ist die überragende Bedeutung des deutsch-österreichischen Bündnisses.

English translation: The course of the great decisions, the unfolding of the great crises in the more recent history of the Danube Monarchy is known, though known so well to only a few as to you; and present to all is the overriding importance of the Austro-German alliance.

The essay asks whether this dependence was historically inevitable. Engel-Janosi answers by tracing an alternative Austro-French lineage: Kaunitz’s eighteenth-century reversal of alliances, Crown Prince Rudolf’s francophile circle, Moriz Szeps’s liberal journalism, and the family networks linking Vienna with Georges Clemenceau, Paul Painlevé, and Sophie Szeps’s Paris salon. Berta appears not as an official envoy but as a carrier of social and political capital, positioned where Austrian liberal culture, French republican access, and hostility to Prussian militarism met.

Gemeinsam war den Schwestern ein leidenschaftliches Bekenntnis zu Frieden und Pazifismus, mit dem eine ebenso ausgesprochene Absage an „preußischen Militarismus“ Hand in Hand ging.

English translation: Common to the sisters was a passionate commitment to peace and pacifism, which went hand in hand with an equally pronounced repudiation of "Prussian militarism."

This pacifism was also a specifically Austrian patriotism. Engel-Janosi presents Zuckerkandl’s wartime opposition not as indifference to Austria but as a conviction that Austria could survive only by escaping German tutelage. Her rejection of wartime enthusiasm gives the episode its emotional premise:

August 1914! Der Krieg! Mich ergriff der allgemeine patriotische Taumel nicht. Ich bäumte mich sofort gegen den Haßrausch auf, der selbst die zartesten Gemüter erschütterte.

English translation: August 1914! The war! The general patriotic frenzy did not seize me. I at once rebelled against the intoxication of hatred that shook even the most delicate spirits.

By late 1916 that revulsion had become a political idea: a separate peace between Austria and France, meant to end the war and preserve Austria from collapse. Engel-Janosi treats this idea critically but seriously. It was not simply salon fantasy, since French and British circles were indeed exploring ways to detach Austria-Hungary from Germany, as the Sixtus mission and Armand-Revertera contacts also show. Yet Zuckerkandl’s retrospective account exaggerated the coherence and promise of these signals.

Immer mehr schlägt die Idee eines Separatfriedens in mir Wurzel.

English translation: More and more, the idea of a separate peace takes root within me.

The Bern journey forms the narrative center. Publicly, Zuckerkandl travelled under cultural-propaganda auspices; privately, she sought contact with Sophie and with the Swiss peace milieu. Hofmannsthal became her most trusted Austrian confidant, while officials and intermediaries received only partial versions of her purpose. Engel-Janosi’s sharpest archival point is the irony that secrecy itself moved through diplomatic and social circuits: Harry Kessler, to whom she spoke with confidence, reported her information to the German envoy Romberg, who passed it on to Berlin. Thus the German authorities learned about the francophile Austrian effort from within the very network that hoped to loosen Vienna from Berlin.

The conclusion is neither romantic nor dismissive. Engel-Janosi notes Zuckerkandl’s illusions, her susceptibility to aristocratic and intellectual glamour, and the changed political context after Briand’s fall and America’s entry into the war. But he also insists that her mission exposes a real, if fragile, possibility: an Austrian peace policy distinct from Germany’s. Czernin’s refusal to break the alliance marks the limit of private diplomacy and the tragedy of the monarchy. Austria could still imagine another historical role, but it could no longer convert that imagination into state policy.