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, Volumes II and III: They Were Found Wanting, They Were Divided
The Transylvanian Trilogy, Volumes II and III: They Were Found Wanting, They Were Divided
In books two and three of the Transylvanian Trilogy, the storm-clouds are gathering over Europe. War breaks out in the Balkans, but the politicians in Budapest are too busy scheming how best to spite the Habsburgs or pelting unpopular prime ministers with inkpots to pay much attention. The minorities question is still unresolved, the people are taking to the streets demanding the right to vote; in Transylvania Bánffy's characters continue to hunt and shoot and dance to the music of gypsy bands. Bálint observes his fellow countrymen embrace World War I with patriotic enthusiasm, never suspecting that defeat and dismemberment will be Hungary's fate.
Bánffy has written an elegy on empire to rival Jospeh Roth's, with the epic sweep and drama of Tolstoy and a tinge of Proustian nostalgia. Yet the blend of criticism, compassion and humour is all his own. An undoubted twentieth-century classic.