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 Splintered Empires: The Eastern Front 1917-1921 (Copy)
The Splintered Empires: The Eastern Front 1917-1921 (Copy)
At the beginning of 1917, the three empires fighting on the Eastern Front were reaching their breaking points, but none was closer than Russia. After the February Revolution, Russia's ability to wage war faltered and her last desperate gamble, the Kerensky Offensive, saw the final collapse of her army. This helped trigger the Bolshevik Revolution and a crippling peace, but the Central Powers had no opportunity to exploit their gains and, a year later, both the German and Austro-Hungarian empires surrendered and disintegrated.
Concluding his acclaimed series on the Eastern Front in World War I, Prit Buttar comprehensively details not only these climactic events, but also the successor wars that raged long after the armistice of 1918. New states rose from the ashes of empire, and war raged as German forces sought to keep them under the aegis of the Fatherland. These unresolved tensions between the former Great Powers and the new states would ultimately lead to the rise of Hitler and a new, terrible world war only two decades later.