Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 46. (1998)
GODSEY, William D. Jr.: Officers vs. Diplomats: Bureaucracy and Foreign Policy in Austria-Hungary 1906–1914
William D. Godsey thought of posting him in the tsarist capital.104 He ended up instead in Rome. And Conrad did not act on Foreign Minister Berchtold’s suggestion that he assign First Lieutenant Baron Manfred Pawel-Rammingen to the military attaché in Bucharest, where Pawel could exploit his familial connections to the Rumanian court.105 Further, the wives of the attachés figured much less conspicuously in their selection and assignment than was the case in the diplomatic corps.106 At least seventeen of the thirty-two military- and seven of the nine naval attachés had wives. No fewer than six of the former and one of the latter remained unmarried. Like their husbands, the women as a group possessed few ties abroad and, by origin, tended to parallel or perhaps even fall slightly below the general social profile of the attachés. Count Alexander Dzieduszycki, who filled the courtly sinecure in Madrid, ironically had married a commoner, while Prince Franz Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfurst contracted a mésalliance with a notorious courtesan named Steffi Richter.107 Military attaché in St. Petersburg at the time, Hohenlohe secretly solemnized his vows in the spring of 1914 in London without first obtaining the permission of the emperor, a requirement for all Austro-Hungarian officers wishing to marry. Had war not broken out, he certainly would have been recalled from Russia and his conduct eventually resulted anyway in disciplinary proceedings.108 More than social luster, the wives seem to have brought their spouses money. Although evidence on the personal finances of the attachés is sketchy, it is nevertheless clear that few enjoyed an appanage such as the one Prince Georg Schwarzenberg received from his father or owned, like Count Stanislaus Szeptycki, estates in Galicia worth several hundred thousand Kronen.109 Conrad’s statement that only a small number of General-Staff officers, from whom the military and naval attachés were drawn, had private fortunes is born out by the available clues.110 All too often, the KA, KM Präs. 1907, 47-2/20; Prinz Johannes Liechtenstein, „Marineattache in Rome 1912 auf 1915,“ unpublished typescript in KA, Nachlaß Prinz Johannes Liechtenstein, B/718:4, 16; Hubka - Allmayer-Beck: Österreichisch-ungarische Militárattachés und Militärbevollmächtigte, p. 4. For Szeptycki’s brother, see Saurer, Edith: Die politischen Aspekte der österreichischen Bischofsemennun- gen 1867-1903. Wien-München: Herold 1968 (Forschungen zur Kirchengeschichte Österreichs 6), p. 178. 105 KA, Nachlaß Conrad, B/1450, folder 99: Berchtold to Conrad, January 14, 1914. In 1880, Pawel- Rammingen’s uncle, Baron Alphons Pawel-Rammingen, had married Princess Friederike of Hannover and Great Britain at Windsor Castle in England. 106 See the discussion of this issue in G o d s e y: Aristocratic Redoubt, chapter 4. 107 Stoiber, Rudolf-Ce 1 ovsky, Boris: Stephanie von Hohenlohe. Sie liebte die Mächtigen der Welt. München-Berlin: Herbig, 1988, p. 44 f. There is a certain piquancy that some of the last correspondence conducted between the Ballhausplatz and its embassy in London in August 1914 concerned Hohenlohe’s mésalliance. See his personnel file in HHStA, AR, F 4, carton 138. Also Benedikt: Damals in alten Österreich, p. 273 fi, who describes the new Steffi Hohenlohe: „Als einer meiner Bekannten die frischgebackene Prinzessin mit Steffi anredete, bedeutete sie ihm, es habe sich ausgesteffelt.“ 109 See Schwarzenberg’s and Szeptycki’s Qualifikationslisten in KA. Conrad: Aus meiner Dienstzeit. Vol. 1, p. 345. 62
