IF ONLY his great-uncle had died earlier. Franz Joseph I was a
masterful ruler of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but his 86 years brought
rigidity when the times called for reform. This doomed the noble legacy
that his great-nephew (full name Franz Josef Otto Robert Maria Anton
Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius
Ignatius) could have inherited. He remembered the old man, as well as
the coronation of his father Charles in December 1916. It was a short
and gloomy reign, in a botched war that left Europe’s most successful
multinational state, the 11-nation monarchy run from Vienna and
Budapest, beyond saving. The four-year-old—first crown prince and then
uncrowned pretender—served nine decades longer, with brains and charm.
Not that people were grateful, especially at first. A gallant British
officer helped the royals escape from Austria, a turbulent and shrunken
republic with no taste for the finery of the past. The other realm,
Hungary, was nominally a monarchy but run by a regent (who, absurdly in a
land-locked country, was styled admiral). Exiled in Spain at a
threadbare and tiny court, the young Otto was schooled for the empty
throne: he was fluent in Croatian, English, French, German, Hungarian
and Spanish. And Latin, too—he was perhaps the last politician in Europe
able to conduct business in that language.
In 1922 he became the head of the House of Habsburg: “Your Majesty”
to legitimists, and by the Grace of God “Emperor of Austria; King of
Hungary and Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia and Lodomeria;
King of Jerusalem, etc; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and
Cracow; Duke of Lorraine, Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and
Bukowina; Grand Prince of Transylvania; Margrave of Moravia; Duke of
Silesia, Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Guastalla, Auschwitz and Zator,
Teschen, Friaul, Dubrovnik and Zadar; Princely Count of Habsburg and
Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gorizia and Gradisca; Prince of Trento and Brixen;
Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia”. His other titles were more minor.
The Nazis sought his help, hoping for some stardust from a real
ex-empire to give lustre to their gimcrack one. But the prince detested
them, having slogged his way through “Mein Kampf”. As a student in
Berlin, he irked Hitler by refusing to meet him. In 1938, as Austria’s
leaders quailed before the Anschluss, the Habsburgs’ scion offered to
return and rally resistance. Luckily, he didn’t get there. The Nazis
ordered that he be shot on sight.
At Roosevelt’s invitation he spent the war years in America, where he
plotted vainly to get Hungary to dump the Nazis, and more successfully
to help Austria shed its image as Hitler’s poodle. But post-war Austria
stayed nervy and vengeful, declaring him an “enemy of the republic”. He
could visit only in 1966, five years after reluctantly renouncing his
claim to the throne, becoming—there and there only—humble Mr
Habsburg-Lothringen. He found his compatriots’ post-imperial neuroses a
tempting target for his jokes. Told of an Austria-Hungary football
match, he asked impishly: “Whom are we playing?”
Exiled monarchs mostly find it hard to keep their dignity: absurdity,
and a court full of creeps and fantasists, are never far away. That was
not the Habsburg style: his family maintained cordial relations with
Europe’s other émigré royals, but his business was more serious. First
he had to restore the family fortune on the lecture circuit, which well
rewarded his erudition and wit. He brought up seven children (five
glamorous daughters, then two much-awaited sons) with his wife Princess
Regina at a lakeside villa in Bavaria. Real politics followed: “opium”,
as he fondly called it. He became a member of the European Parliament in
1979 when that body was just a talking shop, seeing it as a harbinger
of bigger things to come.
A family history going back to the eighth century helped him see the
continent’s destiny in grand terms, with the European Union a wider and
better version of the Holy Roman Empire (his family had headed that
lamented outfit until history caught up with it in 1806). He was no fan
of the Brussels bureaucracy, but promoted the integration his name
epitomised: common culture, open borders and, above all, no more wars.
Only the meanest Austrians remained uncharmed.
Putting the clock back
His glory days came late, in 1989, when what had seemed a sentimental preoccupation with Mitteleuropa—merely
a meteorological term, cynics sniffed—was suddenly practical politics. A
lifetime foe of the communist usurpers in eastern Europe, he plotted
with reformist politicians in Budapest to stage a symbolic cross-border
Austro-Hungarian picnic in the summer of 1989, breaching the Iron
Curtain for ever. Once drenched with blood and tears, the division of
Europe was washed away with tea and lemonade. Some of his fans wished he
had run as the first president of a free Hungary, providing a way back
from the disastrous turning taken 70 years before. Sadly, his modesty
prevailed. He concentrated instead on lobbying for speedy and generous
expansion of the EU to the east, most recently Croatia.
He died a happy man, right about almost everything, if usually too early.
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