The Habsburgs
Wheatcroft, Andrew
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Habsburgs" Little Austria and the Imperials discipline; authoritarian — strict but arbitrary; and authoritative —teach internal discipline by enforcing rational rules. Naturally, Hillary is authoritative—the...
...Inbreeding may explain why the sickly Carlos II (1661-1700) could not sire an heir to prolong the family's two centuries of rule over the Spanish empire...
...They refuse to rule out the chance that they may someday reign again, and are clearly ready in case the call shouldcome...
...Interestingly, when Hillary wants to illustrate what she regards as most closely approximating the kind of real (not federal) "village" that is most appropriately child-centered, she tells us about her idyllic childhood in Park Ridge, Illinois...
...Now that McDonald's and MTV have all but obliterated the Old World of kings and queens, it is tantalizing to imagine the dynasty's restoration...
...Wheatcroft is not quite an apologist for the Habsburgs, but he does correct or qualify a number of common accusations against them...
...She more adamantly refuses to acknowledge that childrearing was not a crisis when mothers were able to stay home to raise their children...
...Naturally, Hillary is authoritative—the best kind...
...Thanks to John Barron, formerly a senior editor at Reader's Digest and author of several previous books on the KGB, we HARVEY KLEHR is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Politics at Emory University and co-author of The Secret World of American Communism (Yale University Press...
...and built monuments, most notably the Escorial in Spain, in which to bury their dead and enshrine the idea of their dynasty's divine mission...
...This meant censorship and secret police, though the repression was "humanized by Austrian lack of enthusiasm and efficiency...
...The rest of the book is the same way: discursive, non-chronological, and vividly imagined, like the best family stories...
...Although surely some of the all-time masters of public relations, the Habsburgs The American Spectator • March 199 6 69 were not merely elegant precursors to the media-savvy politicians of today...
...The enlightened despot Joseph II (1741-179o) pursued his program of "rational" reform as zealously as his forefathers had struggled to impose religious orthodoxy...
...Clinton seems unwilling to face the fact that you can have neighborhoods, with genuinely shared, usually traditional values, that have many of the childrearing benefits whose loss she laments...
...commissioned Titian, Rubens, and other great artists to portray them as the defenders of Christendom against Protestantism and Islam...
...The family's last two generations have been prominent in the movement for European unity, which Wheatcroft calls "the continuation of the Habsburg mission...
...Mexico's would-be emperor Maximilian was executed in 1867...
...They seemed to have posed without much forethought, three daughters rather squeezed together at one end of the row while their sister stands slightly apart at the other...
...There have been so many revelations of the successes enjoyed by Soviet agents in ferreting out American and British government secrets in the past half century that it is sometimes hard to believe that the West still won the Cold War...
...in his dark suit, the father could be a banker or an elegant professor or the international statesman that, in fact, he is...
...He barely alludes to the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and dismisses the defenestration of Prague as a "well-worn story...
...In fact, she does not feel there is any virtue to having mothers at home—day care is more professional...
...To repeat incessantly that "it takes a village" to accomplish this or that social or political endeavor is really to say nothing at all...
...Carlos left his realms to the French Bourbons and not his Austrian cousins, yet the author maintains that the Habsburgs regarded all their lands as one "collective possession...
...And who illustrates a weak, permissive parent...
...More powerfully than any other in the book, this scene suggests how a preoccupation with the symbols of power, and with the sheer longevity of its line, could lead a family to the point at which "the present, and objective reality have a transitory quality...
...World War I rates nothing more than a remark by Franz Joseph (1830-1916), ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that the war would destroy...
...None other than her late mother-in-law Virginia Kelly, whose coddling allowed Roger Clinton to get away with being a drug addict...
...Their clothes do not mark them as royal...
...And the dignity the Habsburgs' past affords them may finally prove the barrier to their success...
...Wheatcroft offers nothing more than a terse caption for the book's final illustration: "Dr...
...FRANCIS X. ROCCA is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...
...Regarding an equestrian portrait of the Emperor Charles V (1500-1558), he moves from the Golden Fleece around Charles's neck to a history of the chivalric order of that name...
...But of course there was a dark side...
...The world of the European Union is not that world of blood, honor, and faith that Otto's forebears conquered through bravery and guile...
...She doesn't even much like the term "mother," preferring to use "parent" or "caregiver...
...So (not that she discusses it) Hillary's generation rebelled with a vengeance and ruined the society in which they flourished...
...The men and women of the House saw themselves as destined to rule or to die trying...
...The Habsburgs drew on vast and varied resources for their mythology...
...Philip II spent the riches he gained from the New World in a vain attempt to enforce Catholicism on the Dutch, and the Emperor Ferdinand II (1578-1637) heard the voice of God telling him to bum heretics...
...Mrs...
...The brutal father in The Great Santini is an authoritarian...
...Or you can have a multicultural society, where we pick and choose the institutions that suit us, and feel no obligation to pay for each other's choices...
...Joseph's nephew and successor Francis (1768-1835), together with his Chancellor, Prince Metternich, responded to the Enlightenment and the ensuing Age of Revolution with a relentless campaign against radicalism and subversion...
...All the families in the neighborhood shared basic values, and looked out for each other's children...
...In the end, there is nothing here besides the decades-old liberal Democrat's wish list of programs and regulations...
...Wheatcroft is above all concerned with how the Habsburgs saw themselves, and persuaded the world to see them, during their centuries of power...
...Naturally, he has left things out...
...These days the account of a single presidential campaign can easily top a thousand pages, but Andrew Wheatcroft has told the story of one of the world's most important families in a third of that...
...Neighborhoods weren't integrated, and women were expected to stay home and raise their children...
...The very real problems of family life in America need more than slogans —and more than stale government programs, too...
...Atk' The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire Andrew Wheatcroft Viking / 384 pages / $34.95 REVIEWED BY Francis X. Rocca Since the early eleventh century, when two brothers in northern Switzerland built the Habichtsburg, or "Castle of the Hawk," the Habsburgs have had their ups and downs...
...Historians usually portray the Habsburgs as genetically indecisive, but Wheatcroft rightly emphasizes the clan's stubbornness...
...perhaps these masters of survival could teach their subjects how to keep up tradition while adapting to change...
...But he also devotes his first sixteen pages to the fourteenth-century battle of Sempach, at which the Habsburgs were defeated by Swiss peasants...
...he did not have the benefit of hindsight...
...They are looking resolutely into the future...
...Famous for making their greatest conquests through marriage rather than war, the Habsburgs have preferred whenever possible—particularly at the height of their power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—to marry each other...
...Francis II(I) — so numbered after he converted the Holy Roman Empire into the Austrian Empire —was no mere blinkered reactionary: "neither thoughtless nor unimaginative, as has been claimed...
...That environment vanished along with the multicultural civilization that the family's Imperial authority had held together...
...The Habsburgs have been called backward-looking for their devotion to tradition, but Wheatcroft stresses their knack for adjusting to the times, explaining that "because their collective past was their greatest, and sometimes only, asset, [they] give the impression of perpetual retrospection...
...But some traditions may be incompatible with our time...
...Thus their characteristic "fat and pendulous lower lip" became a common sight on the crowned heads of Europe...
...there are illuminating flashbacks to other battles, and a reflection on the vast medieval breach "between those who 'bore arms' and those who merely used them...
...Such a perspective has implications of both transcendence and decadence...
...Wheatcroft quotes Robert Musil on the paradox of fin de siecle Vienna—a desert of institutional mediocrity that bloomed with genius —and concludes that "the Habsburg preoccupation with image and affect ...provided an ideal growth medium" in which Freud and Klimt could thrive...
...Yet the House of Austria, as the family is also known, remains a going concern, if for the present a discreetly scaled-down one...
...Otto von Habsburg with his family in 1966, on the balcony of their house at Pocking...
...Comrade Heroes Operation SOLO: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin John Barron Regnery / 319 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Harvey Klehr ldrich Ames is only the latest of a long string of Soviet spies and moles who did extraordinary damage to their county with astonishing ease...
...In 1879, at a private dinner in honorof the Imperial couple's silver wedding anniversary, the younger cousins entertained the rest of the party by staging tableaux from family history, their props the original robes, orbs, and scepters of the ancestors they portrayed...
...For the first time one sees members of the House of Austria broadly and unambiguously smiling, saying "cheese" as in any modern family snapshot...
...the overused metaphor is but a mask for Hillary's lack of vision...
...the other boy, Paul George, is raised in his mother's arms...
...Their general appearance is at once reassuring—good looking on a human scale, well bred yet approachable —and assertive...
...When the line of male succession came to an end in the eighteenth century, the emphasis shifted from ancestry to posterity, with the fecund Archduchess Maria Theresa (1717-1780) playing mother both to her country and her thirteen children...
...70 March 1996 The American Spectator...
...Wheatcroft crafts a spectacular set-piece that includes elaborate descriptions of halberds and ballock-knives and the wooden crests atop the helmets of noblemen...
...The author's concluding comparison of Habsburgs and Kennedys, doubtless well intentioned, is sorely inapt...
...About Ferdinand II, thought to be a fanatic, the author writes: "Under the accepted doctrine (in Protestant as well as Catholic states) that the prince determined the religion of his people, he was within his rights...
...They claimed Roman emperors and Roman Catholic saints for ancestors...
...American espionage against the Soviet Union has received far less attention...
...The empire of Spain's King Phillip II (15271598) once encircled the globe...
...Would that the book's illustrations, several of them a sickly greenish yellow, met the standards of Wheat-croft's commentary...
...In Maximilian's last words before the firing squad: "Men of my class and race are created by God to be the happiness of nations or their martyrs...
...then on to descriptions of its sumptuous banquets, and a disquisition on the layered pagan and Christian meanings of its emblem...
...His latest book, co-authored with Ronald Radosh, is The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (University of North Carolina Press...
...Yet the grouping is not utterly casual: the first-born son, Karl, stands with the Archduke's hands on his shoulders...
Vol. 29 • March 1996 • No. 3
