I first visited Vienna 20 years ago. Visiting the War Museum, I remember meeting a wizened old Austrian gentleman, who put on a great show explaining all the weapons and how they worked.
I had come mostly to see the "sexy" bits – Franz Ferdinand's blood-stained uniform, the convertible he and his wife were riding in when they were shot in 1914 – but I was enraptured by everything else, too. My Austrian weapons man took particular relish in swords, and in the captured Ottoman war booty from the siege of Vienna in 1683.
I don't think I made an impression on him; he probably would have been equally happy chattering away to anyone else. But I came away with an enduring fascination with the strange, lost world of Austria-Hungary.
These are the books which bring me back to the world of the Habsburg dynasty, wherever I happen to be.
1. Europe Transformed 1878-1919 by Norman Stone
It might seem strange to begin with what sounds like a simple history textbook. But Europe Transformed is anything but. Stone is best known as a Turcophile who cut his teeth on Russian history. And yet his first and (to my mind) truest love was for the ill-fated Dual Monarchy uniting Austria and Hungary. The essay on Austria-Hungary is the centerpiece of the book, and well worth the price. It was written, I am told on good authority, under the influence of champagne, which must be why the tone so perfectly matches the subject: exuberant, learned, urbane, slightly tipsy, surprisingly robust, and yet wracked with a sense of impending doom.
2. The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
Sent off to the publisher from Brazil the day before Zweig and his wife killed themselves, this is one of history's most moving suicide notes. Although composed against the backdrop of Nazi ascendancy (roughly from 1934 to 1942), which forced the Jewish Zweig into exile, the author's real elegy is for the Austria-Hungary of 1914, before the Great War wrecked its civilisation and Europe's alongside it (Zweig, a pacifist, spent the war in Switzerland). Similar in spirit to Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Zweig mostly avoids sentimentality, which is remarkable in the circumstances. A wonderful memoir, which perfectly captures the textures and rhythms of life in the Dual Monarchy. One can almost taste the strudel.
3. Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 by Frederic Morton
Like Zweig an Austrian Jewish émigré, Morton was born late enough (1924) never to have lived under the Dual Monarchy, but he still had the kind of intimate "feel" for the place one can maybe only get as a local. Thunder at Twilight is the best kind of popular history, marked by brilliant character sketches, brimming with lively anecdotes, and yet treating an extremely important subject – the outbreak of the first world war – with the gravity it deserves.
4. Der Tod des Doppeladlers: Österreich-Ungarn und der erste Weltkrieg by Manfried Rauchensteiner (Vienna: Verlag Styria, 1993)
A real doorstopper of a book. The product of years of strenuous research on the first world war and the collapse of the Habsburg empire by one of Austria's great historians, the national equivalent of a Max Hastings or Hew Strachan. Magisterial, learned, relentless.
5. The House of Wittgenstein. A Family at War by Alexander Waugh
As the scion of one of England's great literary dynasties, who had already chronicled his own clan's history in Fathers and Sons, Waugh was the perfect author to tackle a family like the Wittgensteins. Some critics found eccentric Waugh's emphasis on Paul, the one-armed pianist who lost an arm fighting the Russians on the eastern front, over Ludwig, the philosopher. And yet Paul's story embodied far better all that was uniquely, strangely Austrian about the Wittgensteins. Reads like a highbrow version of The Sound of Music, though with a truer-to-life ending.
6. The Transylvania Trilogy (The Writing on the Wall) by Miklós Bánffy (3 vols)
Bánffy wrote his trilogy between 1934 and 1940, about the same time Zweig was writing his memoirs. It comprises a sort of Transylvanian War and Peace, illuminating the Hungarian side of the Dual Monarchy. Set in the pre-1914 period, when Budapest was still the capital of an enormous state, the stories deal with the affairs in all senses of the Hungarian aristocracy: their national hubris and frivolity. Superbly translated by Bánffy's daughter Katalin.
7. The Origins of the War of 1914 by Luigi Albertini (translated by Isabella M. Massey (3 vols)
Albertini's masterwork is not exclusively about Austria-Hungary but there are few studies which capture the terrible political dilemmas of the Dual Monarchy better than this one. Albertini, an Italian journalist who edited the Corriere della Sera before Mussolini forced him out in 1925, spent much of the last two decades of his life on this project, interviewing and corresponding with many key policymakers of July 1914 while they were still alive, including the two most important diplomats of Austria-Hungary, foreign minister Leopold von Berchtold and his chief of staff, Alexander Hoyos. Indispensable.
8. Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps 1848-1918 by István Deák
The title is more or less self-explanatory. Not exactly bedtime reading, Deák's study is nevertheless essential for anyone wishing to understand the most important institution in the Dual Monarchy, the multi-ethnic Common Army.
9. Die Spur führt nach Belgrad by Friedrich Würthle (Vienna: Molden, 1975)
Like Deák's, an acquired taste. Will mostly interest those with a pressing interest in getting to the bottom of the Sarajevo assassinations of 28 June 1914. At its best, it reads like a detective novel, blending together historical erudition with forensic science.
10. Alois Musil: Wahrheitssucher in der Wüste by Karl Johannes Bauer (Vienna: Böhlau, 1989)
In a just world, this biography would be read to accompany Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and Alois Musil would be a household name alongside TE Lawrence. Alas, history is written by the winners, and so this wandering Czech-Austrian biblical scholar who tried to unite Arabia's tribes behind the Central Powers in the first world war remains almost unknown to the world outside today's rump Austria. Musil's own writings, with their cold, unflinching analysis of Arabian tribal politics, ring far truer today than Lawrence's overwrought musings – which is not surprising when we consider that Musil, unlike Lawrence, was fluent in Arabic. A classic in the era's desert genre, this book, like Rauchensteiner's, deserves a translator.
