All things considered, Otto von Habsburg was pretty modest. Had history turned out differently he would have been Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. Born in 1912 he had memories, just, of the old world destroyed by the First World War. Aged four, he had walked with his parents behind the coffin of his grandfather, Emperor Franz Josef, who had reigned for 68 years, the final crescendo of the Habsburg Empire and a dynasty that had ruled for six and a half centuries. Succeeding to the throne, Otto’s father, Karl, had to play a dreadful hand. On the losing side at the end of the First War, Austria had the makings of revolution. The British King George V was haunted by the recent assassination of his Romanov cousins by the Bolsheviks, and he sent a train to rescue the Habsburgs. Otto was nine when his father died in exile, and he became head of the house, with a few loyalists calling him “Your Majesty.”
Otto learnt the main European languages, and could speak Latin, appropriate for the devout Catholic that he was. He hated Hitler, who hated him in return. Otto spent the Second World War in Washington, and had contact with President Roosevelt. Then he hated the Communists and they hated him. He never raised his voice, he had humdrum looks not improved by the spectacles he wore, but in his presence you knew that he had natural authority and would always do what he thought right. It was impossible to avoid imagining how much better and safer the world would have been if he were still ruling Austria.
The Habsburg Empire comprised sixteen different nationalities, and the Emperors always tried to find some way of avoiding national strife by constructing over-arching institutions that would make unity out of diversity. It didn’t work, it couldn’t be done. Otto became a member of the European parliament in Brussels, and for twenty years pursued the old illusion of unity there. The attempt to put together incompatible nations had ruined Austria as it must ruin the Brussels experiment. Croatia had been a Habsburg possession, and at the end of his life he was lobbying for it to join the EU. It seemed magnificently stubborn that he was so concerned with a country he might have ruled, and still refusing to learn what ought to have been the lesson of so long ago. He was 98 when he died. R.I.P.
Back in the '80s one of my friends got fascinated with the idea of restoring the Empire, and wrote to Prince Otto. Otto corresponded with him and exchanged Christmas cards.
One of the most important men in Europe carrying on a handwritten correspondence with an ordinary man in Kansas. That's nobility.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThat is so awesome. Wish I thought of that, hee hee. Really interesting to hear a first person account of the fall of the Hapsburgs and their empire. (I wonder if placed most of the blame on his granddad.)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe Balkan nations have spent most of their history at each other's throats. To the ethnically homogenous great powers Austria-Hungary may not have been pretty, but the empire kept a lid on a good deal of that violence. And some parts of those nations wouldn't enjoy a standard of living equal to what they had in 1918 for decades thereafter.
Of all the stupid decisions of the 20th century, the Treaty of St. Germain that broke up the Habsburg empire was among the very stupidest. The victors of WWI gave Hitler a lot of weak nothings to gobble up, and denied the West what would certainly have been a relatively strong central European ally in the Cold War.
After Franz Josef's death, Herr von Habsburg's father, Kaiser Karl, actually offered his subjects a federal constitution that would have satisfied Wilson's relevant Fourteen Points. The allies wouldn't hear of it, probably not least because of Wilson's and George's fierce anti-Catholicism.
A dark world has grown a slight shade darker. RIP.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI wonder how history would have been different if the Hapsburgs decided to stay away from Bosnia, getting embroiled in all the nastness of the Balkans, instead of occupying/annexing in 1878. The Empire was stabilized by the creation of the Dual Monarchy giving the Hungarians autonomy in domestic affairs. The southern border of the Empire previous to the annexation was modern-day Croatia for over three centuries.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe Emperor Franz Josef wasn't Otto's grandfather, he was his second great uncle--his great-granbdfather, Karl Ludwig, was a younger brother of Franz Josef.
I disagree with the idea "The attempt to put together incompatible nations had ruined Austria as it must ruin the Brussels experiment." I would have thought that the histories of the various Habsburg successor states--Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Roumania. and Ukraine, and Yugoslavia--should have proved, in a different context, Ben Franklin's observation "We must hang together, gentlemen...else, we shall most assuredly hang separately." They didn't, and they did, on at least two--and, in Yugoslavia's case, more--occasions.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI believe I have read that Prince Otto played a role in supporting the dissidents in communist Hungary and was considered a hero when communism fell for his role.
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