The Red Prince
The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of On Tyranny, the definitive biography of Wilhelm Von Habsburg, enigmatic and eccentric archduke of Austria.
“Not often does scholarly history soar and entrap like a fine historical novel, but here it does.” —Foreign Affairs
Wilhelm von Habsburg wore the court regalia of a Habsburg archduke, the simple suit of a Parisian exile, and every so often, a dress. After his youthful dream of a Ukrainian kingdom collapsed following the First World War, Wilhelm was, by turns, an ally of German imperialists, a notorious French lover, an angry Austrian monarchist, a calm opponent of Hitler, and finally a spy against Stalin.
In The Red Prince, acclaimed historian Timothy Snyder offers an indelible portrait of a man who embodied the many contradictions of twentieth-century Europe; a figure whose journeys spanned the continent and whose politics and ambitions united the old order of empire with the new politics of the nation-state.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Part of the family that ruled much of central Europe since 1273, Wilhelm von Habsburg (1895 1949) came of age during the last 23 years of the dynasty's rule. Von Habsburg lived a nomadic and tragic life; he was a bisexual and a political chameleon (including a brief pro-Nazi period) who was implicated in a major financial scandal in Paris during the 1930s. But during WWI, he had become a fervent Ukrainian nationalist, and this became his life's one constant, culminating with efforts to help formerly pro-German Ukraine turn to the West at the end of WWII. As Yale historian Snyder (Sketches from a Secret War) shows, his efforts were futile; he was charged by the Soviets with spying and died in prison. Snyder hews closely to his subject, so that the complexities of 20th-century Ukrainian history sometimes get short shrift, e.g., he devotes only two sentences to the 1933 "terror famine" that killed three million peasants. Generally, though, this is an interesting biography of a man whose colorful life embodied many of the tensions that plagued Europe in the early 20th century. Illus., maps.
