BOOKS OF MY LIFE: "If you have ever wondered why marrying your uncle is inadvisable, the Habsburgs can enlighten you."

I'll be purchasing this one.

Indeed, it sometimes seems as if my entire motivation for traveling in Europe has been to track down the legacy of the Habsburgs, particularly in their final iteration as overlords of the Austrian (and later, Austro-Hungarian) empire: from Sarajevo to Konopiště, and Rudolf's Mayerling to Madeira (Karl's island of exile).

In 2003 during the Danube River bicycle ride my friend Bob and I bicycled up the hillside to Artstetten, the heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand's castle. As we were leaving, I mentioned to the gift shop attendant that I'd visited Vienna for the first time in 1985 and learned that Franz Ferdinand's grave wasn't there because he could not be buried with his beloved wife in the "official" imperial crypt owing to their morganatic marriage.

Their final resting places were at Artsetten, hence my visit, albeit 18 years later. I very much wanted to view the crypt at Artstetten.

Franz Ferdinand's marriage is relevant to the book review below, because here was an instance of a Habsburg marrying for love, quite apart from the wishes of the realm. That's why family protocol denied their children rights to the throne, and cruelly withheld from the couple many of the ceremonial perks of royal existence.

The attendant regretted there was no public access to the final resting place of this Habsburg. I understood and didn’t ask for favors. When I started to leave the facility she called to to me; I walked back to the desk and she silently pushed a key across and winked.

That was very nice of her. I was respectful of my time with the victims of Princip at Sarajevo, and took a photo (above). This is the first time it has been seen on the internet.

A breed apart: The Habsburgs’ marriages consolidated lands as well as faulty genes (at The Economist)

European history is unimaginable without the once-imperious family

The Habsburgs. By Martyn Rady. Allen Lane; 416 pages; £30. To be published in America by Basic Books in August; $32.

Martyn Rady’s new book is billed as “the definitive history” of the clan. Not, it must be said, a hotly contested title. Once the names of Europe’s most powerful families—the Bourbons and Battenbergs and Garibaldis—were known across the world. Today, beyond the biscuit tin, they are largely forgotten.

Except, that is, for their eccentric matchmaking. If you have ever wondered why marrying your uncle is inadvisable, the Habsburgs can enlighten you. For centuries they experimented with marriages between first cousins, second cousins and cousins so multiply intertwined that the traditional familial vocabulary breaks down. A mother might double as a cousin; the wife of Leopold I referred to him throughout their marriage as “Uncle”.

The result was less a family tree, branching and widening, than a convoluted web. At one point the mortality rate of Habsburg children reached 80%, four times the average of the time. Of those who lived, many were hideously misshapen, with the infamous drooping lip and jutting Habsburg jaw. It is one of the abiding puzzles of European history that its aristocrats, so good at breeding horses, should have been so bad at breeding themselves.

12 Days of Slovenia & Trieste (Part 12): A free state of Trieste?

Photo credit: "The Free Territory of Trieste."

We look at all these lines on a map and forget how ephemeral they can be. The border of independent Slovenia lies a few miles outside Trieste; 30 years ago it was a component of Yugoslavia. In this part of Europe, much of the geographical flux owes to the Austro-Hungarian empire's death in 1918.

Perhaps my most recent period of sheer Habsburg obsession came in 2012.

• The European Union, the Habsburg Monarchy and my nightstand.
• ON THE AVENUES: The sound of Musil.
• European Journal. Well, sort of.

Arguably any of us who succumbs to fascination with the Austro-Hungarian empire's latter decades almost by definition must be equally gripped by the story of the grouping and regroupings that followed its demise.

And Trieste is a big part of this tale. Might it become something different yet again? This seems unlikely, although hardly anyone at the time foresaw the Berlin Wall coming down, either.

The Free State of Trieste, by Tara Isabella Burton (Slate)

Activists have a plan to make the Italian port city something much bigger.

Somewhere on the Adriatic between the Miramare and Duino castles just north of the city of Trieste, on a sailboat called the Punt e Mes, owned by an amateur historian of the Habsburgs, the filmmaker Luca Wieser said he had an “aforisma” (aphorism) to share with me. It featured prominently in the film he’s working on, an as-yet-unreleased documentary about Trieste during World War II, portions of which he screened for me on his laptop as the Punt e Mes lurched over the waves.

It was a quote from Milan Kundera:

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. … The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

That, Wieser said, was what was happening to Trieste.

“Even in universities,” he insisted, professors taught a skewed version of history, claiming that Trieste was an Italian city. A lie, he said, designed to serve the interests of the powerful.

Wieser and his companions, all members of the fringe Free Territory of Trieste movement, have a dream for their city. They dream that one day, Trieste—a former Austro-Hungarian port city of 250,000, technically within Italy’s current borders but historically culturally amorphous—will be recognized for what it is: a free territory, neither Italian nor Slovene, neither Austrian nor Balkan, but its own distinct maritime capital, a sovereign and cosmopolitan nation ...

12 Days of Slovenia & Trieste (Part 9): Chasing the ghost of Maximilian in Trieste.

It's not hard getting from Lake Bled to Trieste using public transportation, but the schedules don't quite measure up to optimal use of short time. We've booked the equivalent of a local Slovene Uber to make the drive.

As recently as July 11 of this year, I was writing (and thinking) about Trieste in the context of unfinished bucket-list business. 

ON THE AVENUES: Trieste, New Albany and the meaning of nowhere.

"Melancholy is Trieste’s chief rapture. In almost everything I read about this city, by writers down the centuries, melancholy is evoked. It is not a stabbing sort of disconsolation, the sort that makes you pine for death (Although Trieste’s suicide rate, as a matter of fact, is notoriously high.) In my own experience it is more like our Welsh hiraeth, expressing itself in bitter-sweetness and a yearning for we know not what."
-- Jan Morris

Somewhere around 17 or 18 years ago I read Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, "a meditation on the crossroads city of Trieste" by the Welsh journalist and writer Jan Morris (born in 1926 and still very much with us).

Trieste is an Italian city bordering Croatia and Slovenia, on a finger of land on the northern shores of the Adriatic Sea. Once, it rivaled Hong Kong as a great commercial port, a crucial outpost of the Hapsburg Empire where Italians, Slavs, and Austrians met to do business. Trieste’s cosmopolitan character kept it from being dominated by any one religion. The city is pleasant visually, but was too commercial ever to become a center for art or architecture. Morris argues, in essence, that Trieste is a good place but not a great one: the food is excellent but not ethnically distinct, and the people themselves are gravely courteous, but undistinguished. Trieste is almost nationless, thus its appeal to exiles like Morris, who has traveled the world in search of an identity.

In 1987, Trieste was my chosen portal to enter Yugoslavia, and as noted on a few hundred occasions previously in this space, by the time I started traveling in Europe in those ancient Reagan Era days, a fascination with the Habsburg dynasty of the latter (waning) historical epoch had started influencing my destination choices.

Consequently opting for Trieste as a gateway to non-aligned socialism had an ulterior motive, namely the strange figure of Maximilian (1832-1867), the younger brother of Emperor Francis Joseph.

Bearing no hope of succession to the throne, and relegated to relatively lesser sinecures (rear admiral in the Austrian navy, governor of the Habsburg Empire's provinces in today's northern Italy), Maximilian was ripe for exploitation by more conniving power-brokers like the French emperor Napoleon III.

The latter gazed upon Mexico as low-hanging fruit during the period of America's pre-occupation with the Civil War, but a stooge was needed for plausible deniability. Enter Maximilian. Encyclopedia Britannica's introduction is sufficiently terse to chart the dimension of the ill-fated Maximilian's unfortunate career choice in Mexico.

Maximilian, in full Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, (born July 6, 1832, Vienna, Austria—died June 19, 1867, near Querétaro, Mex.), archduke of Austria and the emperor of Mexico, a man whose naive liberalism proved unequal to the international intrigues that had put him on the throne and to the brutal struggles within Mexico that led to his execution.

However, before trundling off to the New World and his appointment with destiny, Maximilian performed the single deed he's most remembered for now, 150 years later. He leveraged his family's wealth into the construction of a castle on the Gulf of Trieste, a few miles outside the city.

The Stunning Miramare Castle in Trieste

In a spectacular location on a rocky spur jutting out into the Gulf of Trieste, the Miramare Castle is no doubt one of Trieste’s major attractions.

It was built between 1856 and 1860 as the residence of archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph Habsburg-Lorraine, a younger brother of the Austrian emperor Francis Joseph I, and his wife Charlotte of Belgium.

I missed it in 1987. I won't in 2019.

ON THE AVENUES: My Franz Ferdinand heritage trail, 30 years ago in Sarajevo.

ON THE AVENUES: My Franz Ferdinand heritage trail, 30 years ago in Sarajevo.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Today's column is one in a series documenting my 1987 summer in Europe. Previously, Slobodan Praljak's suicide prompted a digression about war crimes during the 1990s-era Yugoslav civil war. Coming next, Sarajevo yielded to Mostar as I traveled toward the coast.

---

So young ... so thin.

50 pounds and 30 years later, during the summer of 2017, I had the brilliant idea of using newly digitalized slides from my 1987 European travels to guide a daily narrative about the trip.

This being Roger and not a trained librarian, hiccups were many, and the project wasn't undertaken with the Colin Powell doctrine in mind. Both planning and execution left much to be desired, although I managed to finish the narrative -- or so I thought.

As it turns out, I'd posted photos on social media but not the blog, omitting most of the Yugoslavian portion of the trip. With 2017 drawing to a close, I'm determined to make sense of this so I can move forward to the 1989 slides -- which I'll digitalize first, then start telling the tale at the beginning.

Seriously, I can get organized; I just can't remain organized.

---

Picking up the story on Monday, 18 May 18 1987, I'd arrived in Sarajevo from Zagreb and found cheap, legal lodgings ($5.50 per night) in the spare room within the apartment of a man named Mickey (real name: Milenko Ćurčić). At the time, the street address was Ulica J.N.A. 37, or the Yugoslav People's Army Street. Now it's Ulica Branilaca Sarajeva 37 (the Defenders of Sarajevo Street).

Dinner was taken at a down and dirty workers' cafeteria, and local draft Sarajevsko Pivo (beer) then gratefully consumed for roughly 25 cents per mug.

On Tuesday morning, my Franz Ferdinand obsession took root, and I embarked on a self-guided walking tour of those parts of Sarajevo's core that prominently figured into the fateful day in 1914 when the Habsburg heir and his wife were killed. The following, originally written as part of my 1985 beer blog travelogue about Vienna, hasn't been published at NAC previously.

---

The Habsburg dynasty reigned in various European configurations and locales from the 1400s through its war-ravaged finale in 1918, famously stockpiling its geographical components through strategic marriage ceremonies far more often than armed conflict -- which the Habsburgs often lost.

There’s something to admire in wedding banquets as opposed to bloodletting, although unfortunately, hard-learned lessons were forgotten at the very end.

By the dawn of the 20th century, the Habsburg Empire had been rebranded as Austria-Hungary, and occupied a large chunk of Central Europe – from the Alps to what is now Belarus and the Ukraine, and from Poland to the Adriatic.

The empire was populated by numerous ethnic groups speaking just as many languages, representing most major religions and a few minor ones, and held together largely by a steadily eroding inertia, otherwise known as “divine right” in the person of the venerable emperor, Franz Joseph, who was 84 years old in 1914 and had ruled since the age of 18 in 1848.

His own son having committed suicide, Franz Joseph’s successor was his nephew, Franz Ferdinand – and Franz Ferdinand was a famously complicated individual.

The history of the Habsburgs was a major reason for my visit to Vienna in 1985, with the single most important objective being the city’s military history museum, appropriately located in a complex of 19th-century buildings called the Arsenal. I wanted to learn more about Franz Ferdinand’s life, and chose to begin with his death.

Upon arrival in Vienna, and after the cursory stowing of gear at the Hostel Ruthensteiner and a quick coffee, the Arsenal was my opening afternoon attraction. Happily for an inexperienced tourist often too disorganized to eat, the museum boasted a small, efficient canteen operated by its citizen support arm.

The counter was manned by an elderly mustachioed gentleman who served fat local sausages with a roll and mustard, accompanied by a blue collar Schwecator lager, and all of it available at a very reasonable price. Restored to metabolic equilibrium, it was off to the exhibits.

First came the obligatory suits of armor and medieval skull-busters, followed by racks of muskets, Napoleonic-era uniforms and affiliated ephemera. Modern times drew steadily closer, and then I spotted the relics that occasioned my visit: Franz Ferdinand’s blood-stained tunic, the restored Gräf & Stift automobile in which he rode to his murder in Sarajevo, and numerous facsimiles of photographs taken before and after the assassination.

This was one of the images, and it triggered a lasting personal obsession.

Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are shown exiting the town hall in Sarajevo. In little more than ten minutes, they’ll be dead, dispatched by two improbably well-placed gunshots fired by a youthful Serb terrorist, Gavrilo Princip.

When the photo was taken, the Archduke’s visit to Sarajevo already had careened far off the rails. It was about to get even worse, with misfortune ranging far beyond the shortened lives of the royal couple, to victims all over the world about to be claimed in an unprecedented conflagration.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand comes to us as a blunt, obnoxious, violent and generally unlikable human being, who in his spare time enjoyed slaughtering wildlife under the flimsy guise of hunting.

But had Sigmund Freud been asked, the Viennese doctor surely would have pointed to deeper currents. While not exactly enlightened, Franz Ferdinand’s views on the future of the empire were not at all uniformly in sync with those of his uncle’s conservative coterie. He had his own ideas and advisers, and chafed at waiting his turn, at least in part because of an under-appreciated aspect of his character.

Improbably, Franz Ferdinand was a closeted romantic, and he did something decidedly uncommon among his royal brethren: He fell madly in love, and remained just as madly in love, with a woman of minor nobility who was decreed by the hidebound royal court as inadequately marriageable for the esteemed likes of Franz Ferdinand -- and so of course, he married her anyway.

Doing this triggered severe sanctions from Franz Ferdinand’s own family. He was humiliatingly compelled to endure a morganatic marriage, renouncing the path of succession for his two young children, and explicitly acknowledging that Sophie could not ever participate in the intensively choreographed trappings of royal life.

To the otherwise boorish Franz Ferdinand, who perversely was the perfect family man at home, the sheer idiocy of dynastic protocol became a daily slight. It was an unceasing and mocking insinuation that his beloved wife did not even exist, and it isn’t surprising he nursed a collection of smoldering grudges.

In 1914, Franz Ferdinand had the chance to attend military maneuvers in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a disputed region of mixed ethnicity once occupied by the Ottoman Turks, and recently annexed by Austria-Hungary to the growing dissatisfaction of the neighboring Kingdom of Serbia, where there existed a body of opinion that all Serbs should be united under direct Serbian rule.

In such a highly charged atmosphere, the war games seemed a provocation to many people in the region. It was not necessary for Franz Ferdinand to make the trip, but naturally he did.

Among the reasons for Franz Ferdinand’s decision was this: As defined geographically by the same royal court protocol the heir detested so intensely, Bosnia-Herzegovina was outside the reach of official mandated etiquette. It was a veritable loophole, allowing what amounted to a pleasure trip on company expense, and a chance for him to treat his wife to the perks otherwise denied her. No doubt he chortled at the clever turnabout, and her servants began filling crates.

Meanwhile, this background meant nothing to a young group of nationalistic Bosnian revolutionary conspirators, who were being trained and financed by the Black Hand, a covert group of Serbian army officers. As the days passed prior to Franz Ferdinand’s arrival in Sarajevo, a motley crew of inflamed and malnourished terrorists plotted a tragicomic ambush of the Archduke.

As Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade rolled through Sarajevo, one of the inexperienced terrorists managed to keep his wits and inexpertly toss a bomb. It bounced off the hood of the Archduke’s car and ignited atop the vehicle behind it, injuring a subaltern.

The bomb thrower sought first to drown himself, jumping from an adjacent bridge into the knee-deep river; thwarted, he then tried to ingest poison that wasn't poisonous enough. He was quickly arrested and the group dissolved in panic, with Princip – a true believer if ever there was one – adjourning to the curb outside a coffee house to morosely consider the failures of the botched performance.

But ominously, he kept his gun safely in his pocket.

Meanwhile, in spite of the bomb attempt and further warnings that security could not be guaranteed, the supremely annoyed Archduke elected to finish his official visit at Sarajevo's town hall, where his epic tirade ended only after soothing words from the always helpful, calming Sophie.

Sarajevo City Hall (Vijećnica).

Hence the photo: A bedecked Austrian royal, veins still visibly bursting, descending the stairs while local minor officials in vests and fezes offer tepid and embarrassed salutes. The fear in their eyes is palpable even in ancient black and white. A bad moon is about to rise, and they all seem to know it.

Confusingly, the motorcade resumed. Although Franz Ferdinand’s staff had altered the return route to make it safer, the changes were not communicated to the drivers. The Archduke’s Gräf & Stift made a wrong turn, and its driver was told to halt.

The car stopped on the street directly outside the coffee shop where Princip now emerged to find his original target, seated stock still only 20 feet away, as though serenely posing in the cross hairs. He managed just two shots, each inexplicably perfect, and within moments both heir and wife were gone.

Princip's supposed foot steps,
and the commemorative plaque.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination provided the pretext for European hawks to settle accounts. Six weeks after his death, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia as a heavy favorite, but was mauled repeatedly by the outnumbered Serbs until German forces came to the rescue. Meanwhile, general conflict had erupted throughout Europe, the nasty unforeseen consequences of which endure a century later.

In retrospect, irony abounds. Franz Ferdinand may have been an unsympathetic, disagreeable figure, and yet his unquestioned love for his wife was in part responsible for their passing.

Moreover, he understood perfectly what so many of his royal compatriots did not: Austria-Hungary was not at all equipped to fight a modern, industrial war. Counter-intuitively, the first casualty of war was his country's prime voice for peace.

Soon millions of others would perish, although initially, only two funerals were required. In death as in life, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary went his own cantankerous way, with a little “help” from his hidebound royal family.

That’s because as noted previously, Franz Ferdinand’s final resting place is not among the Habsburg bloodlines deep within Vienna’s Kaisergruft. The same infuriating protocol forbade the presence of Sophie in the crypt, so Franz Ferdinand’s testament called for the couple’s burial together at his family’s castle in Artstetten, a half-day’s bicycle ride up the Danube from Vienna.

In 1985, I was just getting to know Franz Ferdinand’s story. By 2003, almost two decades later, I’d visited several other places connected to Franz Ferdinand: His chateau in Benesov, Czech Republic; the official residence at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna; and of course Sarajevo, where I followed the motorcade route and saw the scene of the crime.

In 2003 a friend and I bicycled to Artstetten. As we were leaving, I mentioned to the gift shop attendant that in 1985, I’d gone to Vienna looking for Franz Ferdinand's grave, only to find he wasn’t there, which was the reason I’d finally made it to Artstetten.

There was no public access to the final resting place of the Habsburg and his wife, and I didn’t ask for favors.

She handed me the key, anyway ... and I had my moments with them, alone.

---

Following are a few other 1987 photos from Sarajevo. It can be safely assumed that much of what you see in these views was damaged during the fighting during the siege of the city in the early 1990s. I haven't been back. Maybe some day.

---

Recent columns:

December 7: ON THE AVENUES: Say goodbye to all that, and expect the bayonet.

November 30: ON THE AVENUES: The 29 most influential books in my life.

November 23: ON THE AVENUES: A few thanks to give before we return to our regular resistance programming.

November 16: ON THE AVENUES: Harvest Homecoming chairman of the board David White replies to Cisa Kubley's column of November 2.

30 years ago today: (April 30) A return to Vienna.

At Schönbrunn Palace.

Previously: 30 years ago today: An April interlude in Interlaken and the Swiss road to Vienna.

---

Day 15 ... Thursday, April 30
Wien (Vienna). City sightseeing

Day 16 ... Friday, May 1
Vienna. May Day parade, Schönbrunn w/John Bridie Murphy

Day 17 ... Saturday, May 2
Vienna. Military museum, Belvedere. Saw John off

Day 18 ... Sunday, May 3
Vienna. Epic hike; Prater. → Night train to Firenze (Florence)

My second-ever visit to Vienna began with an early Thursday morning arrival from Zurich at the Westbahnhof station, just a few minutes from the Hostel Ruthensteiner.

To me, those halcyon early Vienna days are inseparable from the Ruthensteiner, an unaffiliated youth hostel founded in 1968 (!) by a native of the city and his wife from Pittsburgh, whom he had married after attending college in the States. The hostel was a rooted oasis of calm, friendly and efficient helpfulness, certainly one of the finest businesses of its type that I ever encountered while traveling.

With the Ruthensteiner family's younger generations now in charge, the hostel remains alive, well and open for business in 2017, with a 50th birthday coming in 2018 – and as old at it might seem, this still isn't as long as Emperor Franz Joseph reigned (1848 - 1916, or 68 years).

These days, the low season special for a bunk bed in a dorm room is a mere 10 Euros, or circa $12 U.S. The high season price was about $8 during my stay in 1985. That’s not bad, allowing for inflation and the passage of time.

In 1987, on Thursday night, I was occupying a bunk in just such a dorm room and was awakened in the middle night by some of the most cacophonous snoring I'd ever heard, although to say I  felt this snoring in my ribs is more like it.

Groggily concluding that a very large animal was in its death throes, you can imagine my surprise the following morning upon learning that the perpetrator was an older man (probably in his mid-50s), charming, genial and slight of stature.

His name was John Bridie Murphy, and he was a hoot. Snoring aside, we coincided for parts of two days, roaming and seeing the sights. John was one of the first persons I'd ever met who spoke freely about his undiagnosed learning disabilities, and how they hampered him in some ways but impelled achievement in others. He'd made some money shuffling papers, but thought of himself as an artist.

Seeing as Vienna is filled to the brim with art (which he knew) and history (my specialty), the basis of our camaraderie should be obvious.

In ensuing years, we exchanged cards and letters for a while. I'll never forget his inscription on one of them: "We are kindred spirits!" It finally tapered off, and a few years ago I thought to google John Bridie Murphy of Newbury (or Newburyport) Massachusetts, uncovering a relatively recent obituary.

John apparently had a wonderful life. Rest in peace, sir, and thanks for the good times in Vienna way back when.

Insofar as how I experienced the city in 1987, there isn't a great deal to add from 1985, with the obvious exception of the May Day parade, which merits a chapter of its own. These articles from my 1985 travelogue provide partial background of my fascination with the city and its Habsburg offerings.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 10: Habsburgs, history and sausages in Vienna.

From the moment I saw Vienna for the first time, stepping off the train from Venice into Sudbahnhof station, changing money and buying a transit pass, a steadily evolving fascination with the history of the Habsburg dynasty kept percolating in the back of my mind.

John and I visited the military museum so I could commune with Franz Ferdinand.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 11: My Franz Ferdinand obsession takes root.

The history of the Habsburgs was a major reason for my visit to Vienna in 1985, with the single most important objective being the city’s military history museum, appropriately located in a complex of 19th-century buildings called the Arsenal. I wanted to learn more about Franz Ferdinand’s life, and chose to begin with his death.

In 1987, I knew little of Stefan Zweig, but eventually learned.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 12 … Stefan Zweig and his world of yesterday.

Stefan Zweig’s name seldom appears in lists of important 20th-century writers, and yet between the two world wars, he was prolific, and a veritable monolith of the written word. He wrote poetry, plays, fiction, biographies and newspaper commentaries, which were translated into numerous languages and sold all across the planet.

I took few photos apart from the parade. During frequent visits to Vienna in the years to follow, I'd come to understand the appeal of the city's obscure byways and nooks, but in 1987, this was a learning curve still under development, and my focus tended toward the grandiose tourist attractions ... though not always.

The Rathaus (city hall; left) and Burgtheater (right). The twin spires to the rear rise from the Votivkirche (church).

One of the gates to the sprawling Hofburg Palace complex in downtown Vienna. Until 1918, the Hofburg was the nerve center of the Habsburg dynasty.

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National Library), with Heldenplatz (Heroes Square) in the foreground. Interestingly, the library includes a Museum of Esperanto and Collection of Planned Languages.

As for the equestrian statues, the one closest to the viewer in the first photo is Archduke Charles of Austria, from around 1860. The second photo in greater detail is Prince Eugene of Savoy (1865).

St. Stephen's Cathedral dominates the innermost Altstadt. Like much of Vienna, is was heavily damaged during WWII, but subsequently restored.

Just a few miles removed from the Hofburg, Schönbrunn Palace was the "summer camp" retreat of the Habsburg dynasty. As the photo of me at the top of the page clearly shows, it has long since ceased to be a rural vicinity.

The Belvedere Palace always has been a personal favorite, and is put to good use as a museum.

The two Belvedere palaces were built in the early eighteenth century by the famous Baroque architect Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt to be used as the summer residence of Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736). One of Europe’s most stunning Baroque landmarks, this ensemble – comprising the Upper and Lower Belvedere and an extensive garden – is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today the Belvedere houses the greatest collection of Austrian art dating from the Middle Ages to the present day, complemented by the work of international artists such as Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Max Beckmann. Highlights from the holdings Vienna 1880–1914 are the world’s largest collection of Gustav Klimt’s paintings (including the famous golden Art Nouveau icons the Kiss (Lovers) and Judith) and works by Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. Key works of French Impressionism and the greatest collection of Viennese Biedermeier art are further attractions on display at the Upper Belvedere.

I'd noticed this mysterious Pilsner Urquell sign during my 1985 walks, and found it again in 1987. Only now have I thought to ask the Austrian beer writer Conrad Seidl what it was, and whether it still exists. He doesn't know, but is investigating.

Not to neglect this antique neon touting the original Budweiser (brewed in then-Czechoslovakia).

The WWII Soviet memorial still stands amid regular calls to dismantle it.

It is the most obvious landmark on the Schwarzenbergplatz, sandwiched between Palais Schwarzenberg and the Hochstrahlbrunnen fountain, a relic from WWII: The Soviet memorial „Heldendenkmal der Roten Armee". In Vienna, there are several slang terms for it: Looter′s Memorial, Memorial of the Unknown Rapist or "Erbsendenkmal" (pea memorial).

Public housing in Vienna was another topic that fascinated me at the time, although I didn't entirely understand the concept until later. Inscriptions like this were (and probably remain) on virtually every block in the neighborhoods.

These folks looked like they were out for an evening on the town, and while I took this photo solely because of the Gösser Bier sign in the distance, now it seems more atmospheric and richly detailed than that. It's a slice of life, and I wonder where these people are now?

Finally, a universal pictogram suitable for all languages.

Next: May Day in Vienna, 1987.

Make that 102 years.

History.

It just refuses to end.

"Sophie, Sophie, don't die! Stay alive for the children."

Author Frederic Morton has died. I recommend these two books written by him.

The 11-year history of this blog contains numerous references to Vienna, and also to my fixation with the 19th- and 20th-century history of the Austro-Hungarian empire. That familiar mustard yellow and green color scheme deployed by the Habsburgs rocks my world, and I;ve been to almost every stop on my own self-designed Archduke Franz ferdinand heritage trail.

My first visit to Vienna was in 1985, a which point I'd already read Morton's book, A Nervous Splendor. After my third trip to the Austrian capital, he released Thunder at Twilight. To me, these remain essential texts for tourists.

Frederic Morton, Author Who Chronicled the Rothschilds, Dies at 90

... It was in his nonfiction that Mr. Morton most closely examined the Austria that gave him his identity. Most notably, in “A Nervous Splendor: Vienna, 1888-1889” (1979), he recounted a year in the life of the city and its well-known figures — including Freud, Mahler, Gustav Klimt and Arthur Schnitzler — and especially the events surrounding the murder by Crown Prince Rudolf of his teenage mistress and his subsequent suicide, an episode known as Mayerling for the hunting lodge where the killings occurred. (Another National Book Award finalist, that book also served as the basis for a stage musical, “Rudolf,” with music by Frank Wildhorn, the American composer of “Jekyll and Hyde.” It has been staged in Budapest, Vienna and elsewhere.)

Mr. Morton was born on Oct. 5, 1924, into a middle-class family named Mandelbaum — his father’s business made belt buckles for the Austrian Army — and as a boy he was known as Fritz, though his given name, his daughter said, may have been Frederic. In 1938, after the Anschluss, as the German annexation of Austria was known, his father was sent to Dachau, but he was later released. The family fled the country in 1939, first to London and shortly thereafter to New York, where the elder Mandelbaum changed his name, reportedly to be able to join a union known to be unfriendly to Jews.

Young Frederic went to a trade school and learned to be a baker, and later attended City College of New York and Columbia. From the first, he wrote his fiction in English, beginning with the novel “The Hound” (1947), the story of a privileged youth in 1939 Vienna and his comeuppance.

Mr. Morton’s other books include “Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913-14” (1989), a study of the city as Europe plunges toward World War I, and a memoir, “Runaway Waltz” (2005).

"Sophie, Sophie, don't die! Stay alive for the children."

This is the image that started it all for me. It shows the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary and his wife, exiting the town hall in Sarajevo and unwittingly preparing for an appointment with destiny via two well-placed gunshots from Gavrilo Princip.

It was 100 years ago today, and the people pictured above are not happy. It was about to get worse.

The irony of the Archduke's death is that it provided the pretext for the cataclysm of the Great War (now known as World War I). Franz Ferdinand may have been an unsympathetic, disagreeable figure in many ways, but he understood what so many other did not: His empire was not equipped to fight a modern, industrial war. Six weeks after his death, Austria-Hungary invaded tiny Serbia, and was mauled repeatedly by the Serbs until Germany came to the rescue. Meanwhile, general conflict had erupted throughout Europe, the consequences of which endure a century later.

From 1985 through 2006, the life of Franz Ferdinand was a recurring motif in my Central European travels. In 2008, I attempted to explain it, at least in part. It is my hope some day to have the chance to retrace these steps, all in one trip through the former Habsburg lands.

---

Readers of history already know the emperor Franz Joseph's nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as the man whose 1914 assassination in Sarajevo lit the fuse for the Great War. As for me, since my very first visit to Europe in 1985, when I made a visit to Austria's national military museum for the sole purpose of viewing the Archduke's blood-splattered tunic and the automobile he and his wife were using to drive through Sarajevo when Gavrilo Princip's bullets ended their lives, visiting the various Central European locales on the Franz Ferdinand heritage trail has been a constant attraction.

The military museum was first, and also in 1985, I walked through the crypt of the Austrian emperors in Vienna precisely to see where Franz Ferdinand and his wife are not buried – and this absence is a very important part of the overall story.

The Archduke was a blunt, obnoxious, violent, unlikable and repressed human being who in his spare time enjoyed slaughtering wildlife under the guise of hunting.

He also did something decidedly uncommon among his brethren European royalty of the age: He fell madly in love, and remained just as madly in love, with a woman decreed by the royal court to be inadequately marriageable for an heir to the throne, and so he married her anyway, even though doing so forced him to renounce the path of succession for the children, and to acknowledge that Sophie could not participate in the normal trappings of royal life … or enjoy an eternal resting place alongside the properly accredited Habsburg family members.

Inexplicably, the otherwise indefensible Franz Ferdinand was transformed into the perfect family man at home in various estates and castles scattered throughout the realm … but, not unexpectedly, his perceived mistreatment at the hands of protocol rankled, and he nursed a smoldering grudge until the end of his life, which came in Sarajevo during a journey of largely unnecessary semi-official business that was undertaken because it geographically placed he and his wife outside the direct control of the court, inside a province that had been annexed only a short time before, and enabled him to provide his wife, albeit it briefly, with the "official" perks denied her otherwise.

All this meant less than nothing to a young group of nationalistic Bosnian revolutionary conspirators who detested the empire and were being trained and financed by a covert arm of the independent Serbian kingdom's military arm in Belgrade ("Black Hand"), and thus we are brought back to Sarajevo, where the motley crew of inflamed and malnourished terrorists plotted their tragicomic ambush of the Archduke.

To start, a bomb was inexpertly tossed. It bounced off the hood of Franz Ferdinand's car and ignited on the one following it, injuring a subaltern. The bomb thrower sought first to drown himself, jumping from an adjacent bridge into the two-foot-deep river, then, thwarted, tried to ingest poison that wasn't poison. He was quickly arrested and the group dissolved in panic, with Princip adjourning to the curb outside a coffee house to morosely consider the failures of the botched performance.

Meanwhile, in spite of the bomb attempt and further warnings that security could not be guaranteed, a supremely annoyed Archduke elected to finish the official visit to Sarajevo's town hall, resulting in one of the most incredible photos you'll ever see, with the bedecked Austrian royal visibly bursting veins while minor officials in vests and fezes offer tepid and embarrassed salutes. The fear in their eyes is palpable even in the ancient black and white photo. A bad moon is about to rise, and they know it.

But nothing can be done when it comes to fate, especially in the Balkans.

Sure enough, perhaps an hour later, the motorcade resumed without the Archduke's staff having communicated to the lead driver a slight change in route undertaken to make the return safer. Having missed the turn, the cars were halted on the street directly outside the coffee shop where Princip now emerged to find his original target stock still and seated only 20 feet away, posing for the crosshairs. Princip fired two shots, one each for Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, both inexplicably perfect in aim, and within moments, the heir and his wife were both dead.

Throughout my subsequent travels, I've visited the Archduke's "hunting lodge" in Benesov, outside Prague, consumed the beer brewed in his name nearby, returned to Vienna to tour the Belvedere Palace (his official residence), and finally in 2003, arduously climbed the steep side of the Danube valley on a bicycle for the privilege of seeing the ancestral castle at Artstetten, and being presented the key to the mausoleum by the lady on duty so that after twenty-two years, the couple's graves could at last be viewed and my respects offered.

But Sarajevo in 1987 remains the benchmark. The town hall, the bridge and the museum located where the coffee shop had been … the footprints in the concrete sidewalk to show where Princip stood when he struck his blows against the empire … and the ambience of this strange old town with minarets and church spires both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, not to mention synagogues, nestled together on a hillside, with the sprawling newer town encompassing a winter Olympics complex.

Zweig ... again.

In January, I reviewed Stefan Zweig's three lives in a three-part review of "The World of Yesterday."

1. January 25
2. January 26

3. January 27

Lezard's essay is to be considered equal time; in particular, his point about Zweig's thoughts on sexual repression is well taken.

Why Stefan Zweig deserves Wes Anderson's praise ... Zweig peeled back the veneer of Austro-Hungarian culture to expose sexual repression and the nature of love – no wonder he inspired Anderson's latest film, by Nicholas Lezard (Guardian)

... For Zweig was very much the product of mittel-European bourgeois culture. He might even be said to have embodied it – and this may well have been one reason why others who were not Nazis resented his fame and success. Zweig knew everyone worth knowing, but whether they thought him worth knowing is another matter. Thomas Mann was catty about him behind his back, calling him second-rate; as well one writer might say of another whose sales and royalties outstrip one's own.

Part 3: The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig; three lives in a three-part review.

3.

With the Great War passed, Austria fatally diminished, and the postwar inflationary period finally behind him, Stefan Zweig is in the prime of his professional life, and in his memoir, he’s ready for a spate of industrial-strength name dropping. Forever preoccupied with a comfortable, respected, bourgeois existence of art, writing, music and punditry, during the 1920s he thoroughly insulates himself from the approaching storm clouds.

Granted, there are hints of bad times around the corner. A trip to Italy provides a glimpse of Mussolini’s black-shirted thugs in action, amazing Zweig by their mobility and skilled training. Later, two weeks in the fledgling Soviet Union impress him, so determined are the workers there, ostensibly forging a new society, but with the providential assistance of a surreptitious note belatedly passed to him on the penultimate night abroad, he departs with the realization that it’s all just a Potemkin village under rapid construction by a looming Stalin.

Everywhere he travels, Zweig is enamored of the kindness and nobility of ordinary, simple folk, evidently never seeing in the hearts of the masses an innate, vocational ability to drop their pitchforks at a whistle’s notice and man the concentration camp guard tower – as many were about to do, and with pure glee. As could be seen even then, the period after the end of World War I was filled with societal trauma on a massive scale, which contributed mightily to another global war to address unfinished business. Zweig sees these things, but doesn’t. Even after the fact, he isn’t quite able to put them into perspective.

This, then, is my major annoyance with The World of Yesteryear. Looking back from the vantage point of his own exile and disabling, demeaning statelessness, he can see only that numerous others also ignored the earning warning signs of Hitlerism, while at the same time generally exempting himself from responsibility – as though to say, well, after all, I was so very busy rubbing elbows with the creative classes that I never bothered to exercise my voting franchise or take part in any way, so why are they coming after me? I was busy with art and the finer things in life. How could I have known?

Perhaps by opening the window, wetting a finger and raising it to the fetid air, but almost nothing Zweig sensed or saw was permitted to stand in the way of his own meteoric, glittering writing career. If he was prescient on the down-low while others donned blindfolds, might there not have been the chance of him taking some sort of action to mobilize his numerous loyal readers across the planet in the interest of sounding a warning? Of showing a semblance of a pulse?

At last, somewhat alerted by the muddled fate of his operatic exercise with the scheming composer Richard Strauss during the dawning days of Chancellor Hitler (Zweig pens the libretto and sees the piece performed in spite of his Jewishness, which by this point is virtually outlawed), he makes half-hearted preparations to leave Austria, and finally does, although frequent visits back occur throughout the 1930s as the Anschluss draws ever nearer. Does it ever dawn on Zweig that his own dilettantish artistic tendencies might have dulled his antennae? I think not.

I won’t dispute that in the book’s waning pages, a degree of elegiac reflection often emerges, arguably redeeming the whole exercise. Zweig writes movingly of a dying Sigmund Freud, elderly, pain-ridden and stranded in exile in London, but still plumbing mankind’s inner depths. Without a passport or a country, Zweig exists by the courtesy of his hosts in England, America and later Brazil, and describes the disorienting sensation of statelessness with accuracy and pathos.

Still, throughout, he seems only periodically to grasp that the pain and displacement being suffered by vast swaths of humanity surely outweigh his own surprisingly detached annoyance at a productive routine and successful career unfairly and tragically disrupted. Zweig is curiously narcissistic, and the self-centeredness mars an otherwise insightful tome.

1. January 25
2. January 26

Part 2: The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig; three lives in a three-part review.

2.

The onset of World War I provides the first challenging transition in Stefan Zweig’s comfortable, predictable Viennese world. One lifetime passes, and another begins. He observes that the death of imperial Habsburg heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo barely causes a stir in his own social milieu, and why would it? The heir was the objectionable sort, cranky and scowling, and nowhere near as trustworthy and seemly as the ancient whiskered Emperor and other reliable royal court figures like Karl, the new and far more youthful figurehead in waiting.

Reading between the lines, it’s likely that at some point, Zweig actually did meet Franz Ferdinand at a gala, or while strolling along the Ring, and the latter’s unchanging expression and general disinterest in the welfare of human beings did not provide sufficient grist for another Zweig-cum-Zelig moment. Of course, perhaps the doomed heir’s manner suggested that he didn’t like Jewish writers, whereas former mayor Lueger was overtly anti-Semitic but is given a pass by Zweig as being unthreatening, and merely playing to the crowd.

Perhaps Zweig was so relentlessly self-absorbed that none of it registered, ever. One has to wonder. Perhaps by necessity, all memoirs must display a degree of self-absorption, such is the difficulty in finding perspective between personal and public worlds. The distance seems unsurpassable in Zweig’s autobiographical case.

Naturally, Zweig’s summer holiday in 1914 was planned in advance, and occurs in the vicinity of the Low Countries, because he is right there watching as troop trains roll forward near the beach. Mobilization of the European armies is in full swing, according to secret plans written to the rhythm of railway timetables. The writer barely makes it back to Österreich before the national borders slam shut, ending the blissful eras of peace and passport-free travel.

Back home in Vienna, Zweig finds himself too old to enlist and too young to die, and instead handily nabs a featherbedded sinecure in the library of a military branch, all the while continuing to write, to be published and to get paid as the world around him falls to pieces.

Zweig’s eyes finally are opened (or so he reports) during a public relations junket to the Eastern Front, during which he nominally performs his official duties by pawning them off to local Jewish “factors,” and later, shares a filthy hospital train with the dying flower of Austro-Hungarian manhood in route from the hellish trenches to lovely Budapest, where the juxtaposition of death’s gritty squalor and the Hungarian capital’s seemingly unchanged quaint urban ambience so moves him that he makes an important decision: He’ll depart Vienna and wait out the conflict in Zurich. After all, only in neutral Switzerland might Zweig see his remarkable anti-war play staged. Seems the belligerents weren’t interested in sanctioning peaceniks.

Eventually even Zurich is too close to war’s messiness, infested as it comes to be by refugees, spies and operatives, so Zweig moves even further away from the epicenter of the tumult, to a quiet nearby town. It’s mostly about his work, of course. Granted, he has interesting points to make about art and culture in the context of the war, and how the international fraternity of writers came to be as conflicted by patriotism as the workers abandoning the socialist international. Zweig expresses pain and disappointment, and he watches the clock.

With the war over and the Central Powers in shambles, Zweig drags his bulging wallet back to Salzburg in emasculated Austria, pausing at the border to observe ex-emperor Karl heading for exile in the other direction. It’s very cold those first few months in the foothills of the Alps, as inflation rocks the ruined rump, and rowdy Bavarians flock across the border to drink beer until they drop, never anticipating their own prospective inflationary comeuppance, so soon to come.

It’s hard up there on the hillside, in the former lodge of a bishop, but Zweig always has a check in the morning mail … and across the valley, on the mountain opposite his, up on Berchtesgaden, is the man who’ll soon be taking it all away.

A fellow named Hitler.

1. January 25
3. January 27

Part 1: The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig; three lives in a three-part review.

1.

These days, Stefan Zweig’s name seldom appears in lists of important 20th-century writers, and yet between the two world wars, he was prolific, and a veritable monolith of the written word. The Austrian-born Zweig wrote poetry, plays, fiction, biographies and newspaper commentaries, which were translated into numerous languages and sold across the planet.

Oddly, Zweig is remembered now primarily for his strange end. Displaced and disoriented by the conflagration of anti-Semitism unleashed by Nazi Germany, he fled Europe and wandered from place to place, eventually settling in Brazil. There, in 1942, in a famously documented final act, Zweig and his wife committed suicide together.

Among Zweig’s final achievements was to complete his autobiography, which he originally intended to call “Three Lives,” in reference to the three distinct periods in his life: Birth and youth to the commencement of World War I; from war’s end through the advent of the Anschluss (Austria’s forced absorption into Nazi Germany); and finally, exile. The proposed title is telling in light of Zweig’s sad demise, for apparently he was not able to envision a fourth life.

Given the eventual choice of The World of Yesterday as the book’s title, one might reasonably inquire: The yesterday of which of Zweig’s lives?

The “yesterday” of most relevance to me is the one prior to World War I. In the absence of closer examination, I mistakenly imagined the entire book as dealing with this period, which is of interest owing to the imminent approach of the Great War’s centennial. How did a continent seemingly so progressive and at peace with itself erupt into such a bloodletting?

Zweig is right there, on the scene, at 33 years of age in the summer of 1914. His explanation of the events leading to war is little different than most offered during a century of post-war analysis: Societal dynamism constrained by top-heavy monarchical systems, which led to what can only be referred to as boredom on the part of those ignorant of war’s true costs, and when pent-up demand for action (an sort of action) was released by inbred dunderheads scheming at the top of the societal pyramid, catastrophe was the result.

To be fair, there is an elegiac tone to Zweig’s pre-war ruminations. He trumpets the seemingly settled, hierarchical, perennially ordered nature of Viennese society (easier to do nearer its top than the bottom), exalting the abundant theatrical and musical scenes, which interest ordinary citizens as sports do now. One depends on favorite cafés, newspapers and stage luminaries. Life passes. Change seems unlikely.

As to Zweig’s own background, his memoir is conspicuously absent the usual rise from hardscrabble poverty by sheer force of will. In fact, it emerges that he is fairly well off from the very start. A pattern is established: The world is a rosy place for bright young men, and bright young men are far too busy reaping their effortless opportunities to be very much concerned with messy everyday disagreements. Zweig’s is a halcyon world, and this wouldn’t necessarily be noteworthy if not for one small point: He is Jewish.

Jewish -- though not ardently so in any duty-bound sense of religious ritual; nonetheless, identifiably Jewish in pre-war Vienna, and pre-war Vienna is famed as the place where modern anti-Semitism gets its (non)-intellectual bearings. Adolf Hitler, who spends his Vienna period as underemployed and angry as Zweig is ascendant and serene, lives in a miserable flophouse not far from Zweig’s cultured block, and takes his formative ideological cues from the stridently anti-Semitic Viennese mayor, Karl Lueger.

What’s more, while the multi-ethnic and polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire functions with charm and aplomb at the heap’s top, working class Vienna is by most contemporary accounts a rough and tumble, seething reflection of the empire’s considerable intramural tensions. But Zweig notices little of it. Rather, the citizenry is united in respect for the elderly emperor Franz Joseph, and even Lueger isn’t always such a bad chap, after all. Vienna’s relative smallness means that pastoral picnics or woodland strolls await at the end of the tram line.

Is everyone happy in his or her place? It seems so to Zweig, who emerges as the effortless prodigy, forever insulated from the unseemly. School is a lark, and everything he touches turns to gold, gained in his youth without palpable blood, sweat or tears. Zweig churns out flawless copy, and everyone wants some of it. He writes plays and coyly hints at their presumed existence, and immediately there come offers to stage them come from directors at renowned theaters. If there were a German language phrase for “Aw, shucks,” Zweig would be uttering it … often.

Thus, Zweig embarks upon a lifetime of happenstance brushes with the famous and powerful. Zweig eerily presages Zelig, title character of Woody Allen’s 1983 mockumentary, by means of the annoyingly repetitious habit of managing always to be where someone “important” is about to stumble past and ask for a cigarette, or directions to the loo, followed inevitably by the author’s earnest ruminations on the epochal slice of history he just witnessed. We expect Albert Einstein to respectfully ask Zweig for assistance with his latest theory, or Mae West to make an offer for the use of her upstairs room.

And then, all of it crumbles.

2. January 26
3. January 27

The European Union, the Habsburg Monarchy and my nightstand.

"Downton Abbey's" okay, but quite unexpectedly in 2012, the history and legacy of the Habsburg dynasty again became a theme with me, reflected by three novels forming the core of my reading since the middle of June:

Robert Musil, “The Man Without Qualities”
Joseph Roth, "The Radetzky March"
Gregor Von Rezzori, "An Ermine on Czernopol"

Musil was a lengthy commitment, and Roth a far easier read, though no less compelling. The latter novel is ongoing, but may prove to be the most interesting of  them all.

I covered some of this in an earlier post: European Journal. Well, sort of. In the following essay, Cooper picks up where the late Otto left off.

The European Union and the Habsburg Monarchy, by Robert Cooper (Eurozine)

The Habsburg Monarchy lasted five centuries. It was both solid and flexible; it aroused genuine affection among its citizens. But it vanished in a puff of smoke. Should we expect the European Union, shallow in history and unloved by those it serves, to do better?

To be fair, it was more than a puff of smoke. The bullets from Gavrilo Princip's revolver killed the Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia. What killed the Habsburg Monarchy was the four years of pounding by artillery that followed. This brought death and ruin to the old Europe; in Russia it brought revolution and tyranny, and in Germany regime change accompanied by failed revolution, then inflation and depression, and finally world war and genocide.

What arose from the ashes? The answer is: the European Union and NATO. It is the EU and its resemblance to the Habsburg Monarchy that is the subject of this essay, but something needs first to be said about NATO which was and is its indispensable partner.