Still, was it really necessary to compare the shape of Austria to that of a "voluptuous woman sitting on a rock", or to write that "every national revolution, like every bout of lovemaking, owes something to the one that came before"? On the other hand, there are also some very felicitous passages, including neat wordplays on the relative Habsburg skill in war and marriage. So if Snyder's book is sometimes a little overwritten, especially in the opening chapters, this may be excused by the intrinsically over-wrought nature of his subject matter. Or his relative, the Archduke Ludwig Viktor – known as "Lutziwutzi" among his many close friends – who wore skirts and was exiled to a castle near Salzburg in order to get him away from the capital's bath houses? Or the tragic Mechtildis, who went up in smoke with her dress, attempting to conceal a cigarette from her father? Who can resist a hero, Wilhelm von Habsburg, who "could handle a sabre, a pistol, a rudder, or a golf club" and who "handled women by necessity and men for pleasure". I was reminded of this when reading Tim Snyder's riotous and engrossing The Red Prince: the fall of a dynasty and the rise of modern Europe. A character in one of Karl Kraus's satires once described the sitaution of the Habsburg Empire as "desperate, but not serious".
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