About book Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 (2001)
My budding interest in the Habsburgs comes from two friends, one I went to grad school with and writes me about her investigations--also suggesting that we go to Vienna which I'd love to do--and one whose mother was Austrian and is trying to capture that side of her heritage.Two things really struck me while reading this book:(1) How little I know of European history outside of the UK and Russia (which I know pretty well) and Germany and France (about which I know something) and Sweden and Norway (about which I learned some doing genealogical research). I have Norman Davies 1135-page Europe: A History and maybe it's time to start reading it.(2) How little I knew about Archduke Franz Ferdinand whose assassination is commonly believed to have started WWI. I didn't even realize he was the heir to the Habsburg emperor. I think I thought he was an obscure Archduke of no real significance and that fact made the role usually assigned to his assassination particularly pathetic.I must say here that I grew up a monarchist. Not only did I have all the princess fantasies that my granddaughters now enjoy, but my interests focused pretty squarely on the British royal family way beyond princess fantasies--and later on the Russians. There's no doubt that Queen Elizabeth (the first one, of course) was my hero and role model--vain and sexy but also a scholar and most importantly, a woman who thrived in a man's world. These days my politics are liberal and egalitarian, but that's the real world of today. I'm still fascinated by the royals of the past. I just don't know why I never paid much attention to the Habsburgs before. I even speak German--or did years ago and I don't think it would take much practice to get back to it. I have read some about the Prussian monarchs, but never had much interest.Morton's book is fascinating because (1) he accepts the judgment that in the late 19th and early 20th century Vienna was splendid, aristocratic, artificial, decadent--the very essence of fin de siècle--and narrates the events leading up the the assassination and to the World War in that context and (2) because he doesn't focus exclusively on the major players, but builds a wider picture of the Vienna where Freud, Trotsky, and Hitler lived at the time and he sets the scene with the artists and musicians of the day (among whom were Koskoska and Schöneberg). He also puts the reader in touch with the "people" who had they had our sensibilities would have been establishing Occupy Vienna and Occupy Budapest movements.Morton's focus on the major characters is grand. Franz Ferdinand who always scowled and wasn't at all popular but who cared about the people in a modern sense and, ironically, wanted to give the Serbs a greater role in the Empire. Emperor Franz Joseph, the longest reigning monarch in Europe, who was in his 80ies and somehow controlled some of the more off-the-wall of his advisors. (It was an age after all when monarchs were beginning to reign but did not rule, but that transition was not complete.) General Conrad, the army chief of staff, whose main goal was to punish Serbia (even though personally he was glad to see Franz Ferdinand gone since he knew the Archduke would dismiss him when he succeeded the Emperor). The Kaiser (Wilhelm II), characterized beautifully as vain and self-centered and foolish if still powerful and to be appeased since Germany was Austria's main ally. Ditto, the minor characters from Freud and Hitler to the ministers of Britain and France and Russia whose fate hung in the balance as well. There are a lot of minor characters, many of whom are quite memorable in this book.Morton sets up the assassination that almost fizzled dramatically, with bathos as he describes Franz Ferdinand (with is interest in the "people" and his championship of Serbs which the assassins did not know of) and his wife (a whole other story is connected with his marriage to an "inappropriate" countess with no royal blood who always had to walk behind him), with the sense of how nearly the plotters failed and how successful they were, at least in the short run, at disguising the involvement of The Black Hand, which financed them from within the Serb government.This is a popular history but is very well researched and well documented, with notes on each chapter and an extensive biography. Morton is always reaching for rhetorical highs, which I both love and hate. There's no doubt that he's over-dramatic, but it's a dramatic story he's telling and I'm not after all one who insists that history be dry or boring or unappealing to anyone not an academic historian. I suppose what I don't like is how heavily he depends on rhetorical flourishes and how predictable they become. I searched for an example, but some go on for pages, as when he sets up a set of parallels which end in an ironic "Hurrah!" and go one for pages and pages.For me it was a great introduction to an era, a family and a place I want to read more about.
I can think of few other books, save Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station and Andrei Biely's St. Petersburg, that so brilliantly captured the spirit of a time, bringing key figures to life and recreating a vibrant sense of being there. In this case the scene is Vienna, on the eve of the Great War. I was captivated.In part this may have been because Thunder at Twilight was the antithesis of the rather dry biography I'd just finished (The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh by Linda Colley). Where Colley was pedantic, Morton cut a dash; where Colley was painstakingly comprehensive, Morton was creatively selective. Where Colley was speculative, Morton was boldly assertive. Morton's book was a broad yet believable historical tapestry while Colley's was a dutiful piece of neat embroidery.And what a cast of characters! Russian revolutionaries (Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky), aristocrats and courtiers of the Habsburg dynasty (foremost among them the Emperor Franz Joseph and the Crown Prince, Franz Ferdinand); future catalyst of WWII, Adolf Hitler; and a host of intellectual and artistic giants such as Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Oskar Kokoschka, and Arnold Schönberg. Impressively, the main narrative thread isn't lost in this colorful swirl of personages; in fact, for a reader with even a modest grounding in European history and culture, these numerous fleeting appearances only add to the vibrancy of the tale. I was swept up immediately by Morton's heady prose -- at times, I confess, I found it to dip rather heavily into the symbolic or engage in the overly rhetorical flourish -- but still his writing has undeniable evocative power. Here, for instance, is a passage describing the eccentric habit of a struggling artist living in poverty in a Viennese "men's home": "....Now the brush would drop from his hand. He would push the palette aside. He would rise to his feet. "He began to speak, to shout, to orate. With hissing consonants and hall-filling vowels, he launched into a harangue on morality, racial purity, the German mission and Slav treachery, on Jews, Jesuits, and Freemasons. His forelock would toss, his color-stained hands shred the air, his voice rise to an operatic pitch. Then, just as suddenly as he had started, he would stop. He would gather his things together with an imperious clatter, stalk off to his cubicle. "And the others would just stare after him." That, of course, was a sketch of Adolf Hitler. But what most struck me after reading A Distant Thunder is how well Morton had made clear the causes of World War I. Of course, every school boy knows that the trigger was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Like me, however, many have undoubtedly wondered just who was this Franz Ferdinand to have set off such a sequence of cataclysmic events. Morton makes the ill-fated Crown Prince the central character of his book, and in doing so infuses it with heavy irony, for Franz Ferdinand was, despite all his bluster, a constant advocate of peace, not war. That the Great War was begun ostensibly on his account was the supreme irony.Morton adroitly renders a sympathetic but unsentimental portrait of Franz Ferdinand, highlighting his problematic relationship with his uncle, the Emperor, and his devotion to his wife Sophie, whom he had married contrary to Habsburg wishes. If there is a tragedy here beyond the insane march to war, it is this story of a prince and the sacrifices he made for his beloved wife, who was continually slighted by a court intent on keeping her down among the "non-royals" in its merciless pecking order. Finally, as an occasional visitor to Vienna, a city I've long admired, I'm greatly looking forward to reading Morton's other Vienna-inspired history, A Nervous Splendor, which deals with the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889.
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In Thunder at Twilight, Frederic Morton offers an extraordinary window seat on the people inhabiting fin de siecle Habsburg Vienna. His book shows us the glorious, if decadent, multicultural civilization that was destroyed with the onset of World War I. In 1913-14, the people who would have the most influence on the twentieth century, including Freud, Mach, Wittgenstein, Emperor Franz-Josef, Tito, Stalin, Hitler, and Trotsky, all lived within a few square miles of each other. By using an impressive array of archival materials from the Staatsarchiv and newspapers, Morton walks us through the streets of pre-war Vienna, from the coffee shops to the gaudy balls to the districts inhabited by the less fortunate Viennese. As Morton navigates the reader through the public gardens of Vienna, Freud and Jung's personal war for the soul of psychology, and other components of the rich tableau of Austria-Hungary, he makes a convincing argument for why Vienna, not Paris, was the center of the Western world before the Great War.In perhaps the most effective terrorist attack in history, a talentless high school dropout (Gavrilo Princip) and his three accomplices murdered the heir to the Habsburg throne, Franz Ferdinand, under the guidance of Serbian intelligence. In a pattern all too familiar in asymmetric warfare, the murder of the moderate Thronfolger (Crown Prince) precipitated the move to war under the direction of the Imperial Chief of Staff, Konrad von Hoetzendorf, and the ultimate destruction of Austria-Hungary. The cultural and political condition of Vienna became the petri dish for humanity's bloodiest century.
—Jonathan
read this book with pretty good knowledge of ww1, nice to learn more about the events leading up to the war...this book read more like a series of facts that a narrative (imo), not a bad thing by any means and it was nice to "learn the facts..." not the authors fault but the book jacket a bit misleading in regards to the major historical characters in vienna at the time of the book and the role they'd play in the book...if you are a ww1 buff and are looking to learn more about events before the outbreak of the war, i'd recommend this book...not a heavy read and easy to get through...Demel's (Vienna) Alfred AdlerPsycho-Analytical Society "Moses of Michelangelo" Pygmalion - Shaw"Come on and hear, come on and hear..." "Neither Franz Joseph nor any member of the dynasty met the funeral train. There was just one exception. Only the new Crown Prince, the Archduke Karl, escorted his predecessor through the dark and empty streets." (269) town of Artstetten
—Maduck831
Reminds me a little of a western. (Because it is about atmosphere, setting and characters more than about a story) This book took me a couple of monthsm, a little at a time, to read. The author sometimes looses me in excessively flowery prose. (I guess that is fitting given the setting of Hapsburg Vienna) I was fascinated to see the important figures crossing paths before they were important or famous (Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito, Etc). I think this book is timely because of present government largess, knowing it is living beyond its means and just riding the train as far as it will go before inevitable catastrophe.
—James
