The Habsburg Empire
Such a complex history — and the Habsburg kings, historians, and peoples would have it no other way. One could go back to the 11th Century and Radbot of Klettgau who built the Habsburg Castle in Switzerland. The family came to rule Austria in the 13th Century; it was a duchy within the Kingdom of Germany which was rolled into the Holy Roman Empire. You see how a thousand years of histories and millions of peoples from a dozen nationalities/ethnicities/geographies are involved. What we do remember is the end: World War One and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the merciless maelstrom of the 20th Century.
This selection scratches the surface, of course. I am drawn to the history and literature of the Empire because it had such grand concerns (half of modern Europe) and great writers (Banffy, Zweig, Musil, Freud, among many). It also had supremely romantic figures — Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Queen of Hungary, Sissi, a Bavarian girl lifted to the heights of the imperium only to see the beginning of the end before her assassination in 1898, the longest serving Empress in Austrian history. All of History’s wheels-within-wheels seemed to operate in the Empire, all levels of art and science and literature and military tradition.
And we live with the shadows, the ruins, and the consequences of the Empire to these fraught days of the 21st Century.
The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1867-1914
The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1867-1914
The extraordinary and amorphous Hapsburg Empire--that ramshackle realm as Lloyd George called it--extended from cultivated Vienna to the remote hamlets of the Ukrainian East, and comprised a wide mixture of peoples: Magyars, Czechs, Poles and Ruthenians, Slovenes, Croats. Mr. May discusses the many elements of this diverse realm, its society, culture, economy, politics, diplomacy, and great men; the burgeoning forces of nationalism which eventually were to tear the empire apart, and the reasons why it held together as long as it did--reasons which had much to do with the personalities at the head of the realm: Francis Joseph, the Empress-Queen Elizabeth, and various ministers such as Colomon Tisza and Counts Andrássy, Beust, and Aehrenthal, whose characters and achievements are vividly described. The book also deals with Austria-Hungary's relations with the major powers of France, Russia, England, Germany, Italy, and Turkey, and with the growing powers of the Balkan countries, assessing the pivotal role the Hapsburg Monarchy played in the diplomacy of modern Europe.