In Timothy Snyder’s enthralling study of a minor Habsburg prince, we encounter
a figure too overwrought for quality fiction. Wilhelm von Habsburg wore “the
uniform of an Austrian officer, the court regalia of a Habsburg archduke,
the simple suit of a Parisian exile, the collar of the Order of the Gold
Fleece, and, every so often, a dress”. He could deploy a sabre, a pistol, a
rudder and a golf club with equal proficiency. He “handled women by
necessity and men for pleasure”. He consorted with emperors, kings,
partisans, spies, conspirators, fraudsters, rent boys, courtesans,
speculators and resistance agents. He was a “reckless bisexual playboy” who
spent a good deal of money on sex, “but never more than he had, or could
borrow”. Out of the gaudy and changeful life of a man born into an era of
transition and violence, Timothy Snyder has fashioned a powerful historical
fable.
Born in 1895, Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen was a prince between the
ages. The multi-ethnic commonwealth of the Habsburgs was entering one of the
most turbulent phases of its existence. In Bohemia, Moravia,
Croatia-Slavonia, Transylvania, Galicia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and
elsewhere, emergent nationalist movements challenged the legitimacy of the
old order. The grandfatherly reigning Emperor, Franz Joseph, responded to
this predicament with fatalism and a grim determination to cling to power.
His doomed heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, concocted plans for a reform of
the monarchy that would go some way towards accommodating the demands of the
Slav minorities.
But there were others within the ruling elite who sensed that the writing was
on the wall for the ancient empire and threw in their lot with the new
national movements. Among these was Wilhelm’s father, Archduke Karl Stefan,
second cousin of the Emperor, an easy-going, self-indulgent fellow who
retired from the navy at the age of only thirty-six and devoted himself to
tinkling on the piano, painting (badly) and becoming King of Poland. By
1906, he was styling himself “Count of Zywiec” after the family’s vast
wooded estate in western Galicia. The Polish language increasingly took
precedence over German. In 1907, he moved his family to Galicia permanently
and proclaimed the Polishness of his family. One daughter was married off to
a Radziwill, another to a Czartoryski. The estate at Zywiec became a kind of
salon for the Polish cultural elite of Galicia. His eldest son, Albrecht,
followed suit, adopting Poland as his primary national affiliation and
marrying the Swede Alice Ancarkrona, herself an ardent self-elected Pole.
Wilhelm, the younger son, was drawn to another nation altogether, a nation
whose peasant dialects could be heard throughout much of eastern Galicia.
Motivated in part, perhaps, by sibling rivalry, Wilhelm eschewed the Poles
and aligned himself with the Ukrainians. At the age of seventeen, he took a
walking tour to Vorokhta in the Carpathians (today in western Ukraine),
where he encountered the exotic Hutsuls, speakers of a highland Ukrainian
dialect. It was the beginning of a lifelong commitment to a Ukrainian nation
that was still mapping out its cultural coordinates. In later years Wilhelm
would command a Ukrainian regiment, speaking with his men in their own
language and earning among his adopted compatriots the sobriquet “Vasyl the
Embroidered” (Vasyl Vishyvanyi), on account of the white shirt, decorated in
the national style, that he wore under his officer’s jacket.
Junior Habsburg princes had often adopted a pet nationality – it was a
strategy that had proved its value over the centuries. But this was
something new: Karl Stefan and his son were not attempting to bind the
subject ethnic groups to the future of the dynasty, but rather to attach
themselves to the future of an independent European nation. It was a matter
not just of power, but of identity. Karl Stefan aspired to establish himself
on a restored Polish throne. With time, Wilhelm would seek to be “the first
Ukrainian Habsburg”.
It helped that father and son were both inveterate fantasists. In 1907, when
Franz Stefan began his “campaign” for the Polish crown, there was no Polish
throne to accede to. The Habsburg monarchy controlled only Galicia; the rest
of Poland lay within the German and Russian zones of partition. During the
First World War, as the Russians were pushed back by the advancing German
forces, the Polish designs of the House of Habsburg were stymied by the
Germans, not to mention the Polish provisional government, which proclaimed
Poland a republic in November 1918. Undiscouraged by the collapse of Karl
Stefan's dynastic project, Albrecht and Alice stayed on as Polish citizens
in post-war Poland and bargained with the new Republic, which had
nationalized virtually everything, for the right to retain ownership of the
bulk of the family estate at Zywiec.
Wilhelm was in a very different position. A politically united Ukraine under
Habsburg patronage was an even more fanciful construct than a Habsburg
Poland. Whereas Poland could look back on a long history of political
sovereignty and independence (until the partitions of the eighteenth
century), there was no history of Ukrainian political unity. Moreover, the
Ruthenian areas of the Habsburg monarchy accounted for only a small part of
the zone of Ukrainian settlement – the rest extended deep into the Russian
Empire, as far as the Crimean Peninsula. A fledgling Ukrainian state did
emerge from the ruins of the old Romanov Empire, but it was doomed from the
start. Berlin viewed the new “Ukrainian Republic” (proclaimed in November
1917) as a breadbasket for the hungry German home front. The first Ukrainian
president, a celebrated historian who was given to taking his phone off the
hook for long intervals while he corrected the page proofs of his latest
work, was soon brushed aside and replaced by the “Hetman” and German puppet
Pavlo Skoropadsky. Vienna tried to keep an iron in the fire by assembling a
4,000-strong Ukrainian “Battlegroup” under Wilhelm’s command, and Wilhelm
busied himself founding a Ukrainian “national” newspaper, while his staff
wrote stirring plays on patriotic themes and performed them for local
audiences.
All of this was swept away in the wave of chaos that engulfed Ukraine in
1918–19, when the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Poles and peasant anarchist
bands vied for power. By the time Wilhelm left the country via Odessa in
1918, he had ceased to be a significant player; “the nation he had helped to
build”, Snyder remarks, “no longer seemed to need him”.
Astonishingly enough, Wilhelm remained committed to the cause of Ukrainian
liberty. He now circulated in the looking-glass world of European exile
politics. Ever the fantasist, he became involved in numerous pro-Ukrainian
plots, each less likely to succeed than the next. There was a surreal
power-sharing deal with the former Hetman, according to which Skoropadsky
would govern central and eastern Ukraine, eastern Galicia would become
autonomous, and Wilhelm would reign as King over all three. Then there was a
phase of revolutionary agitation: in October 1921, Wilhelm founded a
newspaper emblazoned with the banner “Ukrainians of All Lands Unite!”. There
were schemes to raise money for an invasion army, some involving his royal
relatives, others concocted with figures close to the young Nazi movement.
The zaniest of them all was a “Ukrainian syndicate” that sold shares in
return for preferential access to trade concessions in a future liberated
Ukraine. Whether Wilhelm found anyone idiotic (or idealistic) enough to
invest in this enterprise is unclear.
Nothing came of all this restless plotting. Wilhelm was an incompetent
conspirator; he was unreliable, impulsive, naive and virtually innumerate.
His only commercial assets, as Snyder notes, were his good looks, his dress
sense, and his last name. But his capacity for enjoyment remained
undiminished. Wilhelm found plenty of time for visits to brothels,
travelling, shopping, swimming and tennis. In 1934, when he was living in
Paris, disaster struck. Betrayed by a Ukrainian associate and an
unscrupulous female companion, he was framed for a major fraud. In the trial
that followed, Wilhelm was described in court as a “crowned criminal” who
led a “double life: one for the day, princely, political, and one for the
night, with the worst scum of the big cities and ports”. By the time these
ugly words were resounding in the French press, Wilhelm had fled Paris for
Vienna, leaving behind his Arab “valet” Maurice and a cat that was “dearer
to me than all humanity”. Back in the oversized capital of the rump-state
that had once been the heartland of an empire, Wilhelm turned first to a
Ukrainian restoration scheme favoured by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg
and later, after the outbreak of war, to anti-Nazi resistance work. In 1944,
he was involved in an underground network that helped the Royal Air Force to
locate military targets around Vienna for bombardment.
After the German capitulation, Wilhelm remained in Vienna, where his wartime
involvement with Western espionage agencies ensured that he was closely
watched by the Soviet authorities. In August 1947, he was seized by a squad
of Soviet soldiers, bundled into a car, flown to the Soviet Ukraine, charged
with “aspiring to be king of Ukraine in 1918” and sentenced to twenty-five
years in prison. Wilhelm Habsburg, alias “Vasyl Vishyvanyi”, died of
tuberculosis in August 1948, having served only six months of his sentence.
As striking as the rich narrative detail of this account (trawled from
archives in eight countries and six languages) is the self-consciously
literary manner of the exposition. The opening sentence (“Once upon a time,
a lovely princess lived in a castle, where she read books from the end to
the beginning”) sets the tone, mimicking the artful simplicity of fairy tale
while alerting the reader to the arbitrariness of narrative structures.
There is much play with pastiche in various literary genres (“Wilhelm just
needed a bit of cash; he was about to meet someone with money to spare”;
“this night, with Roman, he seemed happy”). Supercharged metaphors further
heighten the sense of contrivance. Snyder compares the Habsburg sense of
time, for example, to “a dewdrop awaiting the morning sun to release a
spectrum of colour”. Does it matter, he then asks, “that the dewdrop ends up
on the black sole of a jackboot”? The chapters are named for symbolic
colours, brown for fascism, red for communism, lilac for “gay Paris”, and so
on.
These rhetorical flourishes place us at an indeterminate distance from the
protagonists of Snyder’s story. Exactly how seriously are we supposed to
take a man whose “life’s mission, when he was not in a brothel or on a
beach, was to rescue the suffering Ukrainian people”? The archness of tone
is unusual in historical biography, but perfectly at home in the world of
fable, in which characters are used to illuminate predicaments and generate
insights. The real subject matter and moral burden of this book, visible
behind the translucent skein of the life-narrative, is the volatile
chemistry of nation-building in modern Europe. In Eastern and Central
Europe, the nation was the compact, monocultural answer to the multicultural
polities of the old empire. In Central and Eastern Europe, the history of
nation states is marked out in tracks of blood. Today, Snyder suggests, the
multi-ethnic commonwealth of the Habsburg Empire has been reincarnated in
the form of the European Union, while the absolutist experiments of
ultranationalism have at last fallen by the wayside. The excellent brewery
on the former Habsburg estate at Zywiec is now owned by the multinational
Heineken. And out of the ruins of the twentieth century has risen,
improbably, a new Ukraine. Wilhelm’s life was lived in the pursuit of a lost
cause, but his mistakes were instructive and sometimes it is the losers who
have the last word.
Timothy Snyder
THE RED PRINCE
The fall of a dynasty and the rise of modern Europe
352pp. Bodley Head. £20.
978 0 224 08152 8
Christopher Clark is a Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and
the author of The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the
Jews in Prussia, 1728–1941, 1995, and Kaiser Wilhelm II: A profile in power,
2000.
