![]() ![]() Spiritually, he scarcely understood the city. Physically, Franz Joseph had helped to build the graceful city that is modern Vienna. The young Freud was working out his theories of psychoanalysis.īut the sun was dropping rapidly. The young Kafka was turning out dismally prophetic stories in Prague (his sisters would die at Auschwitz). While Franz Joseph fretted over dreary details at his desk, Bruckner, Brahms & Mahler were writing some of history's greatest music, & Johann Strauss some of its gayest. This is an uneven book, but it's solidly researched, and when Marek stops to assess the contemporaneous accomplishments of Viennese civilization, his view can be breathtaking. Was it some final bitterness over the parade of deaths that caused Franz Joseph to push Europe, too, into an orgy of killing, as he declared war on Serbia in 1914? The survivor's instinct could only have deepened as he saw his family cut down by firing squad and assassin: his younger brother Maximilian as Napoleon Ill's cat's paw in Mexico, his son Rudolf as a result of a crime passionnel suicide pact at Mayerling, his wife at Geneva, his nephew Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo. He stubbornly refused to sell the region of Venetia for nearly $1 billion & then lost it-and thousands of lives-as a result of a disastrous war with Prussia. He'd come to power upon his uncle's abdication during the 1848 Revolution and proceeded to put down and punish the rebels ruthlessly. He was literally and psychologically a survivor. Marek makes clear that Franz Joseph was more than a uniformed bureaucrat. Delighted Viennese fiacre divers called him "Herr Schratt." The Emperor regularly nipped down to Katherina's house for coffee after early morning Mass. Once, when he awoke very ill in the middle of the night, he was able to bark only one phrase at the physician who had scurried to him: "Formal dress!" If he'd any off-guard moments, they were reserved for his marvelously bourgeois relationship with Actress Katherina Schratt, a love lasting until he died. He apparently enjoyed the stultifying formality of the Hofburg. While she fluttered through Europe, he would rise before dawn to be at his royal desk by 5-6AM, as absorbed in the minutiae of bureaucracy as a tax clerk. Her marriage to Franz Joseph was one of the century's great mismatches. Primping and dieting narcissistically, she remained an international beauty until age 60, when killed by an Italian anarchist while boarding a steamer on Lake Geneva in 1898. She even translated Shakespearean plays into modern Greek. Eventually, the vivacious queen declared a kind of independence, becoming the adored champion of the cause of home-rule for Hungary, traveling incessantly: now to England to ride after hounds, now to Turkey to explore Schliemann's Troy diggings. Though she married Franz Joseph when she was 16 and gave him a son and three daughters, she played a lonely second fiddle to Franz Joseph's imperious mother Sophie. ![]() Of the two, Elisabeth fares better, perhaps because her spirit seems so restlessly contemporary. He only partly succeeds, mainly because his principal characters were intensely private, imperial strangers both to their subjects and to each other. Vienna-born Author Marek takes the biographical tack in The Eagles Die, concentrating upon Franz Joseph & Empress Elisabeth, obviously hoping that it might do for Habsburg Austria what Nicholas & Alexandra did for Romanov Russia. ![]() The Eagles Die is the story of that Habsburg sunset & of the golden light that Viennese culture shed in the waning days of empire. Within two years of his death, the empire had been reduced to the small country, centered on Vienna, that it essentially is today. When Franz Joseph succeeded to its command, the Habsburg holdings included Milan & Venice, Prague & Cracow, as well as Vienna & Budapest. Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire for 68 years, succumbing at last at age 86, 2 years after the start of WWI. ![]()
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