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

tiresome Francis Ferdinand’s meddling in personnel affairs.117 Apart from his efforts, however, the process of choosing the attachés appears to have been, at least in comparison with the practice in the foreign ministry, remarkably free of such intrusions. Similarly lacking was the Ballhausplatz’s manifest preference for well-connected names of the aristocracy. As one informed source noted, „an illustrious name was not unwelcome, but also not a prerequisite.“118 The opinion of one military attaché of grand background that his social position enabled him to achieve successes not possible under his lower middle-class predecessor carried little weight in the General Staff.119

The differences in social background and bureaucratic culture of the officer corps and the diplomatic service could not fail to affect the relations between the two in the Monarchy’s missions abroad. True, the atmosphere at some posts proved very harmonious, as in the Ottoman captial where Ambassador Count Johann Pallavicini and Joseph Pomiankowski maintained a cordial and cooperative association that included reading each other’s reports and discussing questions of general importance.120 Unlike the practice of some of his colleagues, Pomiankowski refrained from criticizing Pallavicini in his informal letters to Conrad. In Bucharest, the envoy, Prince Johann Schönburg-Hartenstein, maintained a similarly frictionless relationship with Lieutenant-Colonel Thaddäus von (Jordan-) Rozwadowski.121 But the experiences of Pomiankowski and Rozwadowski appear rather to have been atypical, possibly because neither owed his place in the ranks of the attachés to Conrad. Rozwadowski’s long term in Rumania began a decade before Conrad took power at the General Staff, while Pomiankowski spent the years 1901 through 1907 in Belgrade. Conrad hesitated for months before appointing Pomiankowski to Constantinople in late 1909.122

For the most part, however, tension rather than cooperation characterized the relationships of the military attachés with the mission chiefs. In Bucharest, Rozwadowski made way for Moritz von Fischer, a Conrad appointment, whose reports to Vienna rarely agreed with the envoy’s assessments and who generally seems to have made an unsavory impression on the diplomatic personnel. As the wife of the envoy caustically noted, Fischer liked to spit in her husband’s soup.123 Despite his later assertion that the diplomatic and military bureaucracies worked well together, the military attaché in Cetinje, Gustav Hubka, could barely conceal his contempt for

KA, Nachlaß Conrad, B/1450: 105: Julius Vidalé to Conrad, July 4, 1914. When Vidalé wrote this letter, it had already become known that the next anbassador in Berlin would be an officer, Prince Gottfried Ho- henlohe-Schillingsfurst. His formal appointment came on August 4, 1914.

118 KA, Nachlaß Urbanski, B/58: August von Urbanski, „Das Tomisterkind. Lebenserinnerungen des Feldmarschallleutnants August von Urbanski,“ ed. Gustav von Hubka, (unpublished typescript, 1950), p. 78.

119 KA, Nachlaß Conrad, B/1450: 76: Count Stanislaus Szeptycki to Conrad, December 15, 1912.

120 P o m i a n k o w s k i: Erinnerungen, p. 44.

121 Schönburg-Hartenstein, Sophie Prinzessin: Erinnerungen der Sophie Prinzessin zu Schönburg- Hartenstein geb. Prinzessin Oeffingen-Wallerstein (unpublished typescript), p. 113.

122 Pomiankowski: Erinnerungen,p. 45 f.

123 Schönburg-Hartenstein: Erinnerungen, p. 113.

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