The enigma of M. Stanić

The genus aristocrat I divide into two species. One is the aristocrat of the purse. By such an aristocrat I mean a person who, from birth to death, enjoys all the bottomless privileges of multi-generational wealth, political influence, and cultural capital. The other is the aristocrat of the flesh. Such an aristocrat may be piss-poor, have no lineage to speak of, and yet comport himself as if he were entitled to the world in the manner a baby is entitled to the mother’s milk. Know this: M. Stanić was an aristocrat of the flesh, through and through.

When we met at the conference Recovering Forgotten Histories of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Hinterland held in Budapest on those lovely days in June, you asked me to tell you more about M. Stanić after I divulged to the audience present at my talk that I have amassed quite a collection of documents pertaining to this figure. To remind you: three large boxes full of diaries, letters, military honors, photographs, news clippings, peer-reviewed articles, and of course the one monograph which mentions M. Stanić (even if in a footnote, where his name is misspelled as M. Štanić): Julia Offernacht’s The Spectrality of Austro-Hungarian Military and Masculine Ideals, 1867-1919 (published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016).

It brings me immense joy that a younger historian has taken an interest in the fate of this man, over whom I (a very old historian, I must admit) have obsessed for decades. Obsessed, researched, dug in the archives, interpreted. But let me be frank: in the end I have nothing to show for it. Nothing. M. Stanić remains an enigma for me. I feel in none of the explanations on offer (be they psychoanalytical, hermeneutic, contextualist, micro-historical, postmodern, existentialist, sociological, Marxist, feminist, and so on) the pulse of the man. Besides, they contain numerous factual inaccuracies and, on occasion, contextual frivolities.

Is there, in the end, an explanation to be had of any life, of life as such? Or do you, as I, feel the absurdity of such a pursuit in the first place?

I do not wish to digress. I will now tell you what I have learned of M. Stanić.

M. Stanić was born in Alifakovac, one of Sarajevo’s old mahalas, on June 6, 1898, a fact recorded, to my knowledge, only in one source: a March 3, 1916 Narodni list article, which mentions M. Stanić’s illustrious military feats from the perspective of a nationalist movement (though one which never quite knew what to do with M. Stanić, since he never called himself a Croat).

His family, for reasons unknown (M. Stanić certainly never spoke of them in his fourteen volumes of diary), moved to Zagreb in 1902, when he was four. The mother and the father both had family in and around Zagreb, so one may venture a guess that family had something to do with it. M. Stanić’s father, R. Stanić, took up a job with a famed herbalist (herbalist he was in Sarajevo too, R. Stanić that is), while his mother, A. Stanić, found menial work with a fruit and vegetable vendor.

Tragedy fell upon the family on March 5, 1904, when A. Stanić was killed by a metric ton of fruits and vegetables that accidentally fell on her from a cart that simply could not bear the load, overfilled as it was to satisfy the greed of A. Stanić’s employer. A. Stanić happened to be standing behind the cart when the wooden end, loosely fastened to begin with, snapped like a twig from the colossal weight of the pressing fresh apples, carrots, cabbage, potatoes, leeks, and so on. She was almost instantly buried, crushed, and suffocated by this rumbling avalanche of produce (though perhaps not in that particular order). The witness accounts are exceptionally detailed (I have retrieved them from the Zagreb police archives), as the event occurred during a busy hour on a busy market street with many shoppers and passers-by. When the coroners received her body, it reportedly had a most delightful fruity smell, a fact unusual enough to be included in the coroner’s report.

R. Stanić was beside himself. He loved his wife so fiercely, so passionately, that he could not make sense of the world without her. This had the most unfortunate consequence that M. Stanić, six years old, became an entirely unfamiliar object to his father, to the shock and dismay of friends and family.

Here is where the story becomes interesting, because M. Stanić had by this time acquired, by origins entirely unclear, the linguistic and cultural dispositions of a Hungarian nobleman. He developed a perennially haughty, somewhat disdainful, expression on his face, as if it was in his right to be bored by those around him, who he viewed, invariably, as lesser beings. He also developed an eloquent language which belonged more in the cafes and salons of Vienna and Budapest than it did in a modest cottage on the outskirts of Zagreb. All this is according to M. Stanić’s diary which, having been written many years after the fact, must be taken with a healthy dose of skeptical source criticism (I hope you are not one of those historians who spits on Ranke!).

It is no secret that M. Stanić looked down on his father already as a boy. One could say that the father became to the son an unfamiliar object, as a serf is an unfamiliar object to his master.

Father and son. One unfamiliar to the other. The making of a tragedy with no proper subjects. Do you see now why I believe that any researches, any explanations, will only dig deeper into enigma, and reveal nothing but enigma?

The six-year-old would remark on his thirty-eight-year-old father’s clothing: “it is too raggedy; he wears far too much rough wool”. On the father’s beard: “like a dirty birds’ nest, yoghurt crust on it like pigeon droppings.” On the father’s speech: “animal noises interspersed with phrases of the simplest kind, full of grammatical errors.” I quote here from the diaries, which, by the way, are written with a sure hand and with crisp lines, though I make no inferences as to the psychology of the man from these facts.

R. Stanić was a very proud man. Upon seeing the scorn of disgusted distance animating his young son’s face, he would repeatedly lash out, and at times beat the living excrement out of the boy. Yet, R. Stanić quickly came to fear his son, for M. Stanić took the beatings with stoic equanimity. One could even say that M. Stanić’s disdain for his father grew with the intensity of the beatings.

R. Stanić had a brother who lived not far from Zagreb and with whom he was on friendly, though less than cordial, terms. The brother, Ž. Stanić, and his wife, K. Stanić, liked their nephew. By the time M. Stanić was ten, he and his father could not bear each other’s presence. Thus, M. Stanić went to live with his uncle and his wife. Of his time (six years) with K. and Ž. Stanić M. Stanić has written one word in a diary entry written short before his self-inflicted demise: “Sufficient.”

“Sufficient,” yet it is Ž. Stanić who M. Stanić credits for showing him the path to glory: the military life. Through a military career, through manly deeds on the battlefield, the uncle instilled in the nephew that a man of virtually no means, no great lineage, can earn medals and orders to rival any of the noble titles and, more importantly, to match, as it were, natural inward nobility with outward rank, insignia, and possessions.

M. Stanić did not excel in grammar school. His fellow students teased him on account of his penchant for highbrow language, which was quickly labeled ridiculous and laughable in the school by students and teachers alike. Some teachers, on M. Stanić’s own admission, saw him as a freak, a monster, “thinking me incapable of expressing any emotion whatsoever toward my fellow students, thinking me not a child of this time and place. I pity them, wretched beings of lesser human stock.”

When the Austro-Hungarian army, always hungering for soldiers from the occupied territories, offered to shorten the period of schooling for students who enlisted with the imperial forces, M. Stanić, aged sixteen, with the blessing of both his uncle and (more reluctantly) his father, enlisted with the 95th Regiment in Karlovac for his basic training. He excelled in basic training, and was admitted to the officer school at the Ludovica Military Academy in Budapest, where he excelled again yet again.

It was during this period that M. Stanić caught the eye of military genius and Freiherr Stjepan Sarkotić, who attempted to convince M. Stanić of the natural right and destiny for Dalmatia, Croatia, and Bosnia to join into a union. Sarkotić also saw in M. Stanić the glow of a bright future, and a title no lesser than baron. So much is evident in Sarkotić’s memoir, which was published in 1947, eight years after his death.

Of M. Stanić’s stance on issues pertaining to the politics of nation and empire, or even his unguarded opinions thereof, there is virtually no trace, anywhere. The man seems to have been, at least overtly, apolitical (yes, I know, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and so what is clear is this: he served the empire, loyally). This explains why neither the communists nor the nationalists have been able to resurrect his deeds and insert them as a link in the historical chain of their own political projects.

It was also during this time, in Budapest, so goes the consensus among literary scholars at any rate, that M. Stanić and Miroslav Krleža became acquaintances. Of course, it is in large part the appearance of the deplorable and pathetic character of B. Stanić (widely believed by Krleža scholars to be based on M. Stanić) in Krleža’s unpublished novel manuscript Dimne zavjese kroz smrdljivu maglu (Smoke Screens Through the Fetid Mist) which has kept the scholarly fascination around M. Stanić’s biography alive. If you ask me, this interest has more to do with self-serving escapades in “French Theory” (that charlatan Lacan, and so on) and less to do with unearthing the contexts, thoughts, and doings of M. Stanić.

In my possession, I have one photograph of M. Stanić from his period in Budapest. He is fully dressed in his uniform (field-grey cape, peaked cap, shiny black boots), his back straight, a saber hanging by his side. He measures, this I know from his file in the imperial army archives, 1 meter and 74 centimeters. His brown hair is neatly split in the middle. He has a walrus mustache. His face reveals, well, as far as I can tell, nothing. It is entirely blank, as if imitating the empty stare stylistically common in the portraits of aristocrats of the time. I am convinced that this emptiness imitating other emptiness offers a window into the nothingness of his soul.

During the war, M. Stanić was dispatched to Italy. He commanded a unit in the battle on the Piave on July 15, 1918. The Austro-Hungarians, deploying the horse-shoe strategy to great effect, quickly surrounded the dumbfounded and ill-equipped Italian forces. Stanić’s men found themselves on the left-wing formation. But, for reasons unknown, several of his men turned sides (desertions and betrayals, as you know, were not that uncommon among the Austro-Hungarian soldiers from the colonial holdings). These traitors provided the Italians with essential information about their enemy’s formations, information which the Italians used in in their successful counter-attack.

M. Stanić was captured, most of his men killed. He was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Ferrara, from which he was transferred to a great estate on the outskirts of the city which belonged to a descendant of those great Dukes of Ferrara, the House of Estes. Here, he was to toil on peach and nectarine orchards. In his diary from this period of imprisonment, one phrase recurs, a quote from Emperor Franz Joseph: “I did the best I could, but now it’s all over.” He added: “It was over before it started.”

The most well-documented facts about M. Stanić date from this period. Apart from his own diary, he appears in the diary of the estate owner, the eccentric G. Frescobaldi, a self-styled philosopher, follower of Giovanni Papini, and enraged by the rise of socialist and anarchist movements, which he collectively labeled “neo-Savonarolists, but more stupid.” In a diary entry from July 28, 1918, G. Frescobaldi wrote of the first time he met M. Stanić, “a man unlike any other I have ever met, a man who has seized life by the throat, and will not let go.”

As soon as he stepped on the estate, M. Stanić solemnly declared that he refused to work and told his overseer that he demanded to see the owner of the fine estate. In G. Frescobaldi’s diary, M. Stanić is reported to have said the following, in German, a language shared by the two men: “You, great nobleman, in my heart and in my deeds, I am like you, if not superior to you. I will not lift a finger to do this work which is beyond a doubt beneath me. Have you no shame, no sense of honor, Sir? Do you not see the irrevocable transgression you commit against your own noble kind by committing me to such filth?” Frescobaldi of course wrote down the utterance in Italian.

G. Frescobaldi was struck by the audacity and composure of M. Stanić. He was clearly taken with him. From that day on, as G. Frescobaldi writes: “M. Stanić took up quarters in my own villa. I instructed the servants to treat him as my very own brother. And in the few months I knew him, over the many conversations we had on subjects invariably stimulating, I began to consider him, in earnest, as my own brother.”

From the Frescobaldi family archive in Ferrara, I retrieved a photograph of G. Frescobaldi sitting with M. Stanić in a large room in front of an open fireplace, playing a game of chess. The photograph must have been exposed to the sun, it is quite faded.

From Ferrara, M. Stanić sent his father a letter, the only letter he ever sent him, the letter wherein M. Stanić sealed his own fate. He wrote the following to R. Stanić:

“Father, though you never comprehended my outlook on this world, I nonetheless wish to say that I failed in my duty as a son, and as a man. Lest you mistake this admission for an admission of wrongdoing against you, allow me to be more precise: no, I admit no wrongdoing against you. What I did against you any son with dignity beating in his manly heart would have done. No, my error lies in allowing myself to be captured alive, by cowards no less. Ah, such a pity! For I had a grand plan for life after the war. In Budapest, I became betrothed to a young noblewoman of the Esterházy family, to be married to her under the condition that I rose to the rank of vice-marshal by war’s end. With my lieutenancy I was well on my way to fulfilling this requirement. What is more, I have amassed a number of medals of honor and courage, sufficient enough to ennoble the name Stanić, to start a noble lineage, the origin of which would be myself. All this, now, is utterly devoid of meaning, of life, of future. For how can you start a noble lineage with a man who has behaved with such cowardice as I have, letting myself be taken prisoner in such a dastardly manner? This original sin would surely set permanently on the fabric of the House of Stanić-Esterházy. I cannot permit myself such malice on my descendants. Therefore, the only practical conclusion possible, is to part ways with this world. Farewell, Father.”

M. Stanić’s letter along with a separate note of instruction to send this letter to R. Stanić was found next to M. Stanić’s lifeless head, resting on an exquisite oak table in his extravagant room with a large window that overlooked the orchards where the prisoners of war toiled away. The details of this story are told in G. Frescobaldi’s diary, in one of the few volumes that have been published (in Italian, of course).

M. Stanić was buried in the Frescobaldi family graveyard. On his marble tombstone, G. Frescobaldi had inscribed: “M. Stanić. Brave soldier. Beloved brother. Exemplary nobleman.”

When we spoke in Budapest you told me that you intended to trace the Stanić family’s history, in particular their “negotiations of empire of post-imperial polities through migration and social positioning” from the late Austro-Hungarian era through the fall of Yugoslavia.

I was not aware that R. Stanić had remarried and had another son, I. Stanić. I was fascinated to hear you tell me that I. Stanić, M. Stanić’s half-brother, had moved to Sarajevo, settling in Grbavica in the 1950s, where he became a local football legend as a player for FK Željecničar (a team close to my own heart, I must admit). My mind could not but see a hint of ironic and tragic repetition upon hearing that I. Stanić’s son fled Sarajevo in 1992 (by following the Miljacka, I believe you told me), and wound back to Croatia, and Zagreb.

I wish I could offer advice on how to fit the facts of M. Stanić’s life in this broader history of family migration through imperial and post-imperial formations. But I cannot. I can only warn you: beware of the enigma.