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 Transylvanian Trilogy, Volume I: They Were Counted
The Transylvanian Trilogy, Volume I: They Were Counted
On the vast canvas that is the Transylvanian Trilogy, Count Miklós Bánffy paints the picture of an age: pre-Great War Hungary, where a priveledged social elite dance, dream, desire, debate, and duel away their days, only dimly aware that their opulent world - and the whole Austro-Hungarian Empire - is on the brink of collapse. In the foreground are two young aristocratic cousins. Bàlint Abady enters the circus of Budapest politics with a determination to be 'useful', and works hard to improve the lot of Romanian peasants on his estate. He brings a similar persistence to his emotional life, and his tormented affair with Adrienne, wife of the insane Count Uzdy, spans the entire length of the trilogy. By contrast, Lázló Gyeröffy, gifted musician and handsome 'fairy-tale prince', quickly loses the girl he loves and descends into drunkenness, despair and self-loathing. As a backdrop, the magnificent ballrooms and drawing-rooms of Budapest alternate with the Romantic landscape of Transylvania, with its mounts, valleys, waterfalls and endless forests.
Bánffy's masterpiece, written in the 1930s, was rediscovered after the fall of Communism and has achieved global acclaim with this recent English translation.