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Summary
Summary
A charmingly personal history of Hapsburg Europe, as lively as it is informative, by the author of Germania
For centuries much of Europe and the Holy Roman Empire was in the royal hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off--through luck, guile and sheer mulishness--any number of rivals, until finally packing up in 1918. From their principal lairs along the Danube they ruled most of Central Europe and Germany and interfered everywhere--indeed the history of Europe hardly makes sense without the House of Hapsburg.
Danubia, Simon Winder's hilarious new book, plunges the reader into a maelstrom of alchemy, royalty, skeletons, jewels, bear-moats, unfortunate marriages and a guinea-pig village. Full of music, piracy, religion and fighting, it is the history of a strange dynasty, and the people they ruled, who spoke many different languages, lived in a vast range of landscapes, believed in rival gods and often showed a marked ingratitude towards their oddball ruler in Vienna. Readers who discovered Simon Winder's storytelling genius and infectious curiosity in Germania will be delighted by the eccentric and fascinating tale of the Habsburgs and their world.
Author Notes
Simon Winder is the author of two books: the Sunday Times (London) Top Ten Bestseller Germania and the highly praised The Man Who Saved Britain . He works in publishing and lives in Wandsworth Town, London.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The Habsburgs, Europe's most durable, powerful dynastic family, held sway from the late Middle Ages till the end of WWI, ruling lands that now comprise 19 modern countries. Penguin UK editor Winder offers a meandering combination of history, travelogue, and personal digressions to follow his previous work Germania. He begins with flighty, indecisive, mid-15th-century dynasty founder Frederick III and moves mostly chronologically down the line. Maximilian I, Durer's patron and an intellectual man of action, stretched Habsburg holdings "from the Danube to the North Sea." Grandson of Maximilian as well as Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, the canny yet overburdened Charles V opposed the Protestant Reformation, successfully aided in the Italian Wars against France, and nearly ruled all of Europe in the 16th century. Maria Theresa, the sole female sovereign, kept the Habsburg lands intact in the 18th century, had 16 children, and successfully ruled for 40 years. Her son Joseph II liberated the serfs and the Jews, carved up Poland with Russia, and helped repel the Ottomans. In the face of Napoleon, "feeble" Franz II's self-elevation as hereditary Emperor of Austria gave the family another 114 years of power. Overall, Winder's longwinded and self-indulgent rhapsody is knowledgeable and perceptive, but he lets his wit overwhelm the narrative. Illus. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The Habsburg Empire was a ramshackle, lumbering old giant centered in the Danube Valley that held a central place in European politics from the Middle Ages to the end of WWI, ruled by the dominant dynasty of Europe for four centuries, the Habsburg family. Winder set out to wander through the lands that used to constitute the empire, describing and reflecting on what he sees now, particularly in terms of the appearance of villages, towns, and cities, and what he knows through his research as to how things used to look when the Habsburgs held sway. The sentiment around which he builds his colorful narrative is that the longevity of the Habsburg dynasty was due to a mix of cunning, dimness, luck and brilliance. (About one particular archduke, Winder says, he was one of the Habsburgs who make the family worthwhile, who make up for all the pious timeservers who congest the family tree.) This personalized, almost you-are-there view of history results in an arresting combination of anecdote and scholarly examination, where the interests of serious armchair travelers and devoted students of European history meet.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE RIVER DANUBE, like a siren, has seduced at least three authors over the centuries. The first was Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli from Bologna, in the 17th century. His work grew into six wonderfully illustrated volumes, published in Latin in 1726. The second was Claudio Magris, from Trieste, in the 20th century. A professor, scholar and novelist, he completed a journey to the Black Sea in 1986, just before the fall of the old Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Like Marsigli, he had no very clear idea of what kind of book he wanted to write, yet in the end, Magris produced "Danube," a masterpiece. In his hands, the river is not just a majestic force of nature but becomes the silent hero of the book. Like Laurence Sterne with Tristram Shandy, Magris discovered the unlikely circumstances of the Danube's origins, at least in folklore. It was a stream of water gushing from a tap, which no one had managed to turn off. For a moment he mused on what might happen if someone did manage to turn the great river off at its source, and Bratislava, Belgrade and Budapest were left "completely waterless." Now, in the 21st century, there is a third author, Simon Winder, from London. But he is the first historian of the Danube to try knockabout humor. The British have enjoyed the ridiculous in history ever since two humorists, survivors of World War I, published "1066 and All That" in 1930. A sample: "King Edward's new policy of peace was very successful and culminated in the Great War to End War. ... It was the cause of nowadays and the end of History." Audiences loved it, especially when it was made into a play. Magris's "Danube" is a great work of literature, but it is without much levity. Winder's inspiration, by contrast, is to create history as English pantomime. He had already experimented with this approach in the splendid "Germania" (2010), where he clowned about, telling jokes. It worked perfectly. Yet for all its comedy, "Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe" would have to be, as he says, "a less sunny book than 'Germania'" because the peoples of the former Hapsburg Empire have had a dark history; even now, the scars still show. In the English-speaking world, Central Europe has been as strange and alien as the Gobi Desert or the Arctic. In 1938, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, in a broadcast to the British nation about a confrontation with Hitler over Austria and Czechoslovakia, referred to the irrelevance of "a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing." He emphasized "we" and "nothing." Such isolation continued even after 1945. Vienna was under occupation until 1955, and before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, only Yugoslavia, among Communist-controlled countries, developed international tourism. Winder's "Danubia" describes what is still an unknown world for many people, but early on, he must have made a crucial decision. Unlike Marsigli and Magris, he has taken as his subject not only the Danube, but Danubia. Just two letters different, but an ocean of new meaning: Unlike the river, Danubia does not exist. It is simply an idea, immaterial, the product of a fertile imagination. Winder covers the entire sweep of the old Hapsburg lands, taking us from the far north, Cracow and Lviv, to Ragusa (Dubrovnik), in the south. To the west this area includes Braunau (with its minatory boulder outside the birthplace of Adolf Hitler), while Ruse on the Danube, birthplace of the writer Elias Canetti, is the significant outpost far away to the east. For four years, Winder roamed Central Europe like a tonsured mendicant on a mission, hunting down relics. He counted off the sanctuaries where something unusual could be found - the Abbey of Melk, the monasteries of Carinthia and Slovenia, small towns, abandoned corners in museums. His tales are spellbinding because he does not just sit in an archive or a library, but takes the reader out into the real world. And he does not stop with the end of the Hapsburgs in 1918 but rolls on into the 21st century. Winder's book is more demanding than either of its predecessors. His personal history is performed by a chorus of different voices, each one telling part of the story. It begins with laughing-out-loud, in the provincial Hungarian town of Pecs, where "the cappuccinos are a bit hard-won." Then Winder becomes the soft-spoken man-who-knows, explaining in a few sentences what happened in Pecs around A.D. 400, when everyone "either fled or was killed or enslaved by Hun raiders." If you get frustrated with any one actor in Winder's drama, another soon comes along, though most captivating of all is the author's own worried, defiant tone. "The longer I have spent thinking about this book the more horror and disgust I feel for nationalism, which seems something akin to bubonic plague." This was as true after 1945 as before 1914. In Lviv/Lemberg/ Lemberik/Lwow/Lvov "almost the entire population was killed or expelled - for being Jewish, for being Polish, for being German, for being wealthy, for being proNazi or pro-Communist." With its many parts and its cast of thousands, "Danubia" is less a narrative than a giant mosaic. The incidents Winder describes are the mosaic's tesserae - the touchstones that carry the story forward. Just one example: In the Natural History Museum in Vienna, he walks past prosaic modern displays to find "tucked into a corner ... a small glass jar containing a basilisk preserved in spirits." It's a fake, but it provides Winder with a perfect segue to Prague and to Emperor Rudolf II, one of the few Hapsburgs to excite him. A "personal history" is necessarily unpredictable and idiosyncratic in this way, and anyone who wants a solid, middle-of-the-road trudge through the Hapsburg lands might pass on this book. That would be a major mistake. Behind the pantomime flummery there is an acute and agile intellect at work, allowing Winder to move effortlessly from the Big Picture (related in a gravelly, Dr. Kissinger-like voice) to pointillist detail. He writes of Fafner, a particularly scary dragon, that it is "the nationalist critique of Habsburg monarchy, ... but it is quite interesting." Yes, it is, but only because Winder then manages to explain Emperor Franz Joseph's complex and shifting policies in a few decisive lines. "The Habsburgs are universally viewed as the stupid giant ... To be fair, Franz Joseph does try to use the Tarnhelm" - a magic, shape-shifting helmet - "to improve his situation, switching from absolutism to bits of democracy, from activism to inertia, from centralism to federalism, but almost always in ways that appear too late, cynical and incompetent. He keeps changing shape under his magic helmet, but you can still see the side-whiskers." Winder is the best-read cicerone imaginable. He never stops talking and rarely pauses for breath. Even then, however, you want to tell him: Forget about breathing and just go on talking. "Danubia" is a long book, yet this reader would not mind if it were longer still. Unlike the river, Danubia does not exist. It is simply the product of imagination. ANDREW WHEATCROFT'S cultural history of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy will be published later this year.
Guardian Review
Even though the Habsburgs ruled much of central and eastern Europe for centuries, it is hard to write a coherent history of such an otherwise incoherent swath of Europe, from Belgium to Bukovina. Simon Winder is at his best when, in the manner of an engaging teacher, he gives it to you straight. The Habsburgs' influence over history from the 1360s to 1918 was overwhelming, he says, "but often the 'great events' of the continent's history were generated as much by their uselessness or apparent prostration as by any actual family initiative". He has clearly been everywhere, and it is a shame we don't get more of an idea of what it was like for the "ordinary people" who lived in the empire. Though we do get his amusing thoughts on the "cone-shaped" breasts of the nude caryatids in the Musikverein concert hall in Vienna, and on the risk of being hit "by a falling piece of allegorical woman" in Lviv, where "almost every pediment or turret has a tribute to the limber models and girlfriends" of the sculptors who created them "on an industrial scale". Tim Judah - Tim Judah Even though the Habsburgs ruled much of central and eastern Europe for centuries, it is hard to write a coherent history of such an otherwise incoherent swath of Europe, from Belgium to Bukovina. Simon Winder is at his best when, in the manner of an engaging teacher, he gives it to you straight. - Tim Judah.
Kirkus Review
Offbeat portrait of the lost past of Central Europe, ruled by the dull but dependable Habsburg dynasty. That history stretches out for nearly half a millennium, and Penguin Press U.K. editor Winder (Germania, 2010, etc.) pokes into nearly every corner to examine both the stability of what would become the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its inevitable decline in the aftermath of World War I. With characteristic lightheartedness, the author ascribes the dynasty's longevity to "the ability of the senior male to produce heirs and avoid going mad," but it did not hurt that the Habsburgs introduced a perfectly functioning if soulless bureaucratic machine of the sort that Habsburg subject Franz Kafka would lend his name to. Winder ranges broadly in space as well as time. As he notes, half of the time it took to research and write his book was spent simply wandering the streets of provincial and national capitals as well as small villages, turning up treasures such as the great imperial cathedral at Speyer, where Rudolf of Habsburg lies buried: "For anyone growing up in England or France and used to Gothic it is very alarming to be surrounded by Romanesque gigantism, particularly when made expressionist by malevolent pools of darkness and weird echoes from shuffling feet." Winder's offhand, jokey mannerisms could be precious in lesser hands, but he pulls it off, and his book has plenty of serious turns, as when he ponders the curious rise of nationalism in a country that embraced several quite different nations, from Transylvania to Slovakia to a large stretch of the German-speaking world. That nationalism, of course, eventually produced Adolf Hitler, who may have been inevitable. "Was it inherent in the destruction of the Habsburg Empire," Winder wonders in closing, "that Nazism would result?" It's a meaningful question, one of many that Winder raises in this lucid, often entertaining historical travelogue.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| Maps | p. xv |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| Place names | |
| The Habsburg family | |
| Chapter 1 Tombs, trees and a swamp | p. 17 |
| Wandering peoples | |
| The hawk's fortress | |
| 'Look behind you!' | |
| Cultic sites | |
| The elected Caesars | |
| Chapter 2 The heir of Hector | p. 51 |
| The great wizard | |
| Gnomes on horseback | |
| Juana's children | |
| Help from the Fuggers | |
| The disaster | |
| Chapter 3 'Mille regretz' | p. 87 |
| 'The strangest thing that ever happened' | |
| The armour of heroes | |
| Europe under siege | |
| The pirates' nest | |
| A real bear-moat | |
| Chapter 4 The other Europe | p. 117 |
| Bezoars and nightclub hostesses | |
| Hunting with cheetahs | |
| The seven fortresses | |
| Chapter 5 A surprise visit from a flying hut | |
| 'His divine name will be inscribed in the stars' | |
| Death in Eger | |
| Burial rites and fox-clubbing | |
| The devil-doll | |
| How to build the Tower of Babel | |
| Chapter 6 Genetic terrors | p. 177 |
| The struggle for mastery in Europe | |
| A new frontier | |
| Zeremonialprotokoll | |
| Bad news if you are a cockatrice | |
| Private pleasures | |
| Chapter 7 Jesus vs. Neptune | p. 209 |
| The first will | |
| Devotional interiors | |
| The second will | |
| Zips and Piasts | |
| Chapter 8 The great crisis | p. 243 |
| Austria wears trousers | |
| The Gloriette | |
| The war on Christmas cribs | |
| Illustrious corpses | |
| Carving up the world | |
| Chapter 9 'Sunrise' | p. 277 |
| An interlude of rational thoughtfulness | |
| Defeat by Napoleon, part one | |
| Defeat by Napoleon, part two | |
| Things somehow get even worse | |
| An intimate family wedding | |
| Back to nature | |
| Chapter 10 A warning to legitimists | p. 313 |
| Problems with loyal subjects | |
| Un vero quarantotto | |
| Mountain people | |
| Chapter 11 The Temple to Glorious Disaster | p. 343 |
| New Habsburg empires | |
| The stupid giant | |
| Funtime of the nations | |
| The deal | |
| An expensive sip of water | |
| Chapter 12 Mapping out the future | p. 375 |
| The lure of the Orient | |
| Refusals | |
| Village of the damned | |
| On the move | |
| The Führer | |
| Chapter 13 The sheep and the melons | p. 411 |
| Elves, caryatids, lots of allegorical girls | |
| Monuments to a vanished past | |
| Young Poland | |
| Chapter 14 'The fat churchy one' | p. 439 |
| Night music | |
| Transylvanian rocketry | |
| Psychopathologies of everyday life | |
| The end begins | |
| Chapter 15 The curse of military contingency | p. 471 |
| Sarajevo | |
| The Przemysl catastrophe | |
| Last train to Wilsonville | |
| A pastry shell | |
| The price of defeat | |
| Triumphs of indifference | |
| Conclusion | p. 505 |
| Map of Modern Central Europe | p. 514 |
| Bibliography | p. 517 |
| Illustrations | p. 529 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 533 |
| Index | p. 535 |
