Austria Hungary Quotes

At first I was almost for giving in; I thought I never could bear it. Yet, in spite of all, I’ve borne it— Only ask me not how. —HEINRICH HEINE QUOTATION, KEPT ON SISI’S DESK CHAPTER 13 Moravia, Austria-Hungary Summer 1885 “Let’s see now.

I know this,” Sisi said, ignoring the noblewoman’s censorious stare. “It is: Franz Joseph the First, by the Grace of God, Emperor of Austria; King of Hungary and Bohemia; King of Lombardy and Venice; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Kraków; Duke of Lorraine; Grand Duke of Transylvania; Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, and Parma, and Piacenza—

Most American view World War II nostalgically as the "good war," in which the United States and its allies triumphed over German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese militarism. The rest of the world remembers it as the bloodiest war in human history. By the time it was over, more than 60 million people lay dead, including 27 million Russians, between 10 million and 20 million Chinese, 6 million Jews, 5.5 million Germans, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 2.5 million Japanese, and 1.5 million Yugoslavs. Austria, Great Britain, France, Italy, Hungary, Romania, and the United States each counted between 250,000 and 333,000 dead.

Tell me,' he asked, with some embarassment, as we strolled along: 'you're a bloody German, aren't you?' 'Oh, no. I'm Hungarian.' 'Hungarian?' 'Hungarian.' 'What's that? Is that a country? Or you are just having me on? 'Not at all. On my word of honour, it is a country.' 'And where do you Hungarians live?' 'In Hungary. Between Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia'. 'Come off it. Those places were made up by Shakespeare.

Germany’s siege mentality and gnawing sense of encirclement (the need to ‘storm out of the fortress’ to prevent a Russian attack); Austria-Hungary’s hatred of Serbia; Russia’s deep fear of Germany; France’s vengeful chauvinism; and Britain’s ferocious Germanophobia.

There’s always a motive, Father. Ever since the war between the Balkan League of Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria against Turkey, we’ve heard nothing but reports of infighting within the league for the spoils of Turkish territories. Look at Hungary and Austria, who invested heavily in Serbia and then insisted that an independent Albanian

The struggle had been a people's war. The suffering and sacrifice had been immense. Those who survived the ordeal were left with the question of what it had all been for.

My homeland,' says the guest, 'no longer exists. My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin. What’s left? Whatever mysterious substance held it all together no longer works. Everything’s come apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded. When that happens, the only thing to do is go away.

Emperor Maximillian had brought peace to the kingdoms of Moravia, Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary. Though he had no time for his many children, he had found time to cultivate tulips in his beloved hrad gardens in the city of Prague.

The news that war had finally been declared filled Sigmund Freud, now fifty-eight years of age, with elation: ‘For the first time in thirty years, I feel myself to be an Austrian, and feel like giving this not very hopeful empire another chance. All my libido is dedicated to Austria-Hungary.’52

Jews, Gypsies, Kurds, and other minorities were generally safe within autocratic regimes such as Habsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey but were killed or oppressed when these autocracies began giving birth to independent states dominated by ethnic majorities, such as Austria, Hungary, Romania, Greece, and Turkey.

Islam will aim to establish itself as the majority in France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Any country, in which they successfully establish themselves will serve as their primary base for the invasion of neighbouring countries (such as Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Hungary and the Mediterranean)

It gradually dawned on Wilhelm that, since neither he nor the Tsar had wanted war, the entire conflict had been carefully engineered by ‘internationalists’ who wished to bring down the monarchies of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia, in order to create a ‘world government’ of socialists and financiers, whose agendas were cleverly concealed behind a façade of pacifism and philanthropy.

For five years the refugees of Eastern Europe had been pouring into Austria through every fast-closing gap in the barbed wire: crashing frontiers in stolen cars and lorries, across minefields, clinging to the underneath of trains, to be corralled and questioned and decided over in their thousands, while they played chess on wooden packing cases and showed each other photographs of people they would never see again. They came from Hungary and Romania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and sometimes Russia, and they hoped they were on their way to Canada and Australia and Palestine. They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects.

All in all, French armies wrought much suffering in Europe, but they also radically changed the lay of the land. In much of Europe, gone were feudal relations; the power of the guilds; the absolutist control of monarchs and princes; the grip of the clergy on economic, social, and political power; and the foundation of ancien régime, which treated different people unequally based on their birth status. These changes created the type of inclusive economic institutions that would then allow industrialization to take root in these places. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization was rapidly under way in almost all the places that the French controlled, whereas places such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not conquer, or Poland and Spain, where French hold was temporary and limited, were still largely stagnant.

But old tensions and enmities persisted. Britain’s King George V loathed his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s supreme ruler; and Wilhelm, in turn, envied Britain’s expansive collection of colonies and its command of the seas, so much so that in 1900 Germany began a campaign to build warships in enough quantity and of large enough scale to take on the British navy. This in turn drove Britain to begin an extensive modernization of its own navy, for which it created a new class of warship, the Dreadnought, which carried guns of a size and power never before deployed at sea. Armies swelled in size as well. To keep pace with each other, France and Germany introduced conscription. Nationalist fervor was on the rise. Austria-Hungary and Serbia shared a simmering mutual resentment. The Serbs nurtured pan-Slavic ambitions that threatened the skein of territories and ethnicities that made up the Austro-Hungarian empire (typically referred to simply as Austria). These included such restive lands as Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Croatia. As one historian put it, “Europe had too many frontiers, too many—and too well-remembered—histories, too many soldiers for safety.

Ironically, the redrawing of Europe’s map on the new principle of linguistically based national self-determination, largely at Wilson’s behest, enhanced Germany’s geopolitical prospects. Before the war, Germany was surrounded by three major powers (France, Russia, and Austria-Hungary), constraining any territorial expansion. Now it faced a collection of small states built on the principle of self-determination—only partially applied, because in Eastern Europe and the Balkans the nationalities were so jumbled that each new state included other nationalities, compounding their strategic weakness with ideological vulnerability.

This era no longer wants us! This era wants to create independent nations-states! People no longer believe in God. The new religion is nationalism. Nations no longer go to church. They go to national associations. The Monarchy, our Monarchy, is founded on piety, on the faith that God chose the Hapsburgs to rule over so and so many Christian peoples. Our Emperor is a secular brother of the Pope, he is His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty; no other is as apostolic, no other majesty in Europe is as dependent on the Grace of God and on the faith of the peoples in the Grace of God… The Emperor of Austria-Hungary must not be abandoned by God.

From the days of the Assyrians and the Qin, great empires were usually built through violent conquest. In 1914 too, all the major powers owed their status to successful wars. For instance, Imperial Japan became a regional power thanks to its victories over China and Russia; Germany became Europe’s top dog after its triumphs over Austria-Hungary and France; and Britain created the world’s largest and most prosperous empire through a series of splendid little wars all over the planet. Thus in 1882 Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, losing a mere fifty-seven soldiers in the decisive Battle of Tel el-Kebir. Whereas in our days occupying a Muslim country is the stuff of Western nightmares, following Tel el-Kebir the British faced little armed resistance, and for more than six decades controlled the Nile Valley and the vital Suez Canal. Other European powers emulated the British, and whenever governments in Paris, Rome or Brussels contemplated putting boots on the ground in Vietnam, Libya or Congo, their only fear was that somebody else might get there first. Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the “United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy). It was the bargain of the millennium.

The entire Habsburg landscape was given a deep, even coating of musical interpretation, whether Smetana and Dvorak in Bohemia or Haydn and Schubert in Austria or Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary. As soon as you head south from Hungary or the Carpathians this music stops. And with food, the greedy, complex and extravagant Habsburg world of layered cakes, a mad use of chocolate, subtle soups and fine wines goes off a cliff. This is obviously an enormous subject, ludicrously compressed here, but the very idea of such complex foods trickled down in the west from royal courts, famously with the development of the idea of the 'French restaurant' in the aftermath of the Revolution. Indeed, we all eagerly guzzle a range of court foods - with many Indian and Chinese restaurants in the west also serving essentially court Mughal or Qing banquet foods, albeit in mutilated forms.

Marvin thought of his bowel movements as BMs, a phrase he'd heard an army doctor mutter once. His BMs were turning against him, turning violent in a way. He and Eleanor went through the Dolomites and across Austria and nipped into the northwest corner of Hungary and the stuff came crashing out of him, noisy and remarkably dark. But mainly it was the smell that disturbed him. He was afraid Eleanor would notice. He realized this was probably a normal part of every early marriage, smelling the other's smell, getting it over and done with so you can move ahead with your lives, have children, buy a little house, remember everybody's birthday, take a drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway, get sick and die. But in this case the husband had to take extreme precautions because the odor was shameful, it was intense and deeply personal and seemed to say something awful about the bearer. His smell was a secret he had to keep from his wife.

that? Masculinity is and was a broad category that encompassed many forms of behaviour; the manliness of these particular men was inflected by identities of class, ethnicity and profession. Yet it is striking how often the key protagonists appealed to pointedly masculine modes of comportment and how closely these were interwoven with their understanding of policy. ‘I sincerely trust we shall keep our backs very stiff in this matter,’ Arthur Nicolson wrote to his friend Charles Hardinge, recommending that London reject any appeals for rapprochement from Berlin.156 It was essential, the German ambassador in Paris, Wilhelm von Schoen wrote in March 1912, that the Berlin government maintain a posture of ‘completely cool calmness’ in its relations with France and approach ‘with cold blood’ the tasks of national defence imposed by the international situation.157 When Bertie spoke of the danger that the Germans would ‘push us into the water and steal our clothes’, he metaphorized the international system as a rural playground thronging with male adolescents. Sazonov praised the ‘uprightness’ of Poincaré’s character and ‘the unshakable firmness of his will’;158 Paul Cambon saw in him the ‘stiffness’ of the professional jurist, while the allure of the reserved and self-reliant ‘outdoorsman’ was central to Grey’s identity as a public man. To have shrunk from supporting Austria-Hungary during the crisis of 1914, Bethmann commented in his memoirs, would have been an act of ‘self-castration’.

         In the first days of 1950 Israel was a brand new country, in an agitated state, all in motion. Daily, all sorts of boats arrived to its shores bringing immigrants from Europe. The survivors had first gathered in towns in Austria, Germany, France, Romania, Hungary and under the guidance of "shlichim," young men and women organizers, sent from Israel. The homeless proceeded to port cities in Southern Europe, mostly Italy and France, and eventually reached Israel. Whatever boat could keep afloat was leased to transport those desirous to reach the shores of the Land.

Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, was well into his sixties. His wife, the Empress Elisabeth, had been assassinated years before by an anarchist, his only son had died in a murder-suicide pact, and now the Archduke, his heir, was dead. The fate of Europe might well depend on what a bitter old man decided.

Disraeli had no wish to go as far as this, and instead proposed a conference of the great powers of Europe (Austria–Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia) to persuade the Turks to reform their administration.

These volumes will leave the reader in no doubt about the opinion of their author. From first to last it is contended that once the main armies were in deadlock in France the true strategy for both sides was to attack the weaker partners in the opposite combination with the utmost speed and ample force. According to this view, Germany was unwise to attack France in August, 1914, and especially unwise to invade Belgium for that purpose. She should instead have struck down Russia and left France to break her teeth against the German fortress and trench lines. Acting thus she would probably have avoided war with the British Empire, at any rate during the opening, and for her most important, phase of the struggle. The first German decision to attack the strongest led to her defeat at the Marne and the Yser, and left her baffled and arrested with the ever-growing might of an implacable British Empire on her hands. Thus 1914 ended. But in 1915 Germany turned to the second alternative, and her decision was attended by great success. Leaving the British and French to shatter their armies against her trench lines in France, Germany marched and led her allies against Russia, with the result that by the autumn enormous territories had been conquered from Russia; all the Russian system of fortresses and strategic railways was in German hands, while the Russian armies were to a large extent destroyed and the Russian State grievously injured. The only method by which the Allies could rescue Russia was by forcing the Dardanelles. This was the only counter-stroke that could be effective. If it had succeeded it would have established direct and permanent contact between Russia and her Western allies, it would have driven Turkey, or at the least Turkey in Europe, out of the war, and might well have united the whole of the Balkan States, Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Roumania, against Austria and Germany. Russia would thus have received direct succour, and in addition would have experienced an enormous relief through the pressure which the combined Balkan States would instantly have applied to Austria-Hungary. However, the narrow and local views of British Admirals and Generals and of the French Headquarters had obstructed this indispensable manéuvre. Instead of a clear strategic conception being clothed and armed with all that the science of staffs and the authority of Commanders could suggest, it had been resisted, hampered, starved and left to languish. The time gained by this mismanagement and the situation created by the Russian defeats enabled Germany in September to carry the policy of attacking the weaker a step further. Falkenhayn organized an attack upon Serbia. Bulgaria was gained to the German side, Serbia was conquered, and direct contact was established between the Central Empires and Turkey. The

This argument is not supported by the evidence. As indicated by their earlier mobilisations (especially Russia’s), in 1914 France and Russia were far more eager to fight than was Germany – and far, far more than Austria-Hungary, if in her case we mean fighting Russia, not Serbia. Germany declared war first on France and Russia because of Bethmann’s misguided sense of legal propriety, but she mobilised last, and even then hesitatingly, with her leaders (except for the timetable-obsessed Moltke and Falkenhayn) clutching desperately for exits, as indicated by how eagerly the kaiser, Bethmann, and Jagow jumped on Grey’s last-minute neutrality offers.

When the Soviet army liberated war-ravaged Eastern Europe, they had promised the people free elections with Hitler gone. At first, Stalin kept his promise. But when communist parties in Poland, Hungary, Germany, and Austria lost in the free elections of ’45 and ’46, Stalin set his secret police, the NKVD, in motion. The secret police reopened former Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz to imprison Poles and Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen to imprison East Germans. The communists built sixteen new camps to hold Hungarians.

The French Revolutions were not the only wars operated by the Illuminati other conspiracies, wars and revolutions were also directed by them. The conspiracy behind the December Revolution of 1825, the revolutions in Italy in 1848, the Philippine uprising of 1896, the revolutions in Portugal in 1907, the fall of the Russian throne in 1917, Austria-Hungary in 1918, the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the disappearance of the monarchies and nobility, the Second World War and the Cold War, which divided the world into two blocs, and finally the collapse of communism in Europe, and the attacks on September 11, 2001, all were led with absolute certainty by the Order of the Illuminati. As we will see all these wars, tensions and problems were knowingly created and are part of the Illuminati plan.

Among Europe’s Great Powers only Austria-Hungary remained without a colonial empire.

others helped Austria-Hungary carry out a ruthless occupation of Serbia. When the war ended, that tiny country would have proportionately the highest death toll, military and civilian, of any combatant, nearly one out of five of its people.

Page 244: It is worth pausing for a moment to ponder the significance of the fact that cultural pluralist ideas originated in two multinational, imperial structures: Austria-Hungary and British Canada. While those nostalgic for the Dual Monarchy or the empire on which the sun never set tend to idealize them as nonnational regimes, treating all subjects according to a single rule, in fact both empires, like multinational regimes throughout history, survived as long as they did by adroitly playing off one nationality against another.

… other nations throughout Europe have built their own territory markers, including Spain, Greece, Norway, Hungary, Macedonia, and Austria. Are these countries racist? Are they building walls in the name of racism? Of course not.

The disease was the most catastrophic pandemic the world has yet known, the bubonic plague that killed at least one out of every three Europeans within a four-year period in the mid-fourteenth century. The Black Death, as it was called because of the characteristic dark, festering lumps in the groins, armpits and necks of its victims, originated in Asia and was transported to Europe by rats. Beginning in 1347 the Black Death invaded Italy, Spain, France, England, Germany, Austria and Hungary, sometimes travelling two and a half miles a day. By the time its first visitation had ended, twenty-five million people had died.

The assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia in March 1881 marked the beginning of an era of political assassinations that included the murders, in quick succession, of President Sadi Carnot of France in 1894; Spanish prime minister Canovas del Castillo in 1897; Empress Elizabeth of Austria and Queen of Hungary in 1898; King Humbert I of Italy in 1900; President William McKinley in 1901; and King Carlos I of Portugal and his heir apparent in 1908. And then, on June 28, 1914, at Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbian nationalists threw a bomb into the carriage of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew and heir of Austria-Hungary’s Emperor Franz Joseph II, killing him and his young wife, Sophia.11 The scene was set for a world war.

Although it was never conceptualized by a Czech movement, paradoxically enough, Czech 'organic work' in economic, social, and cultural modernization advanced strikingly during these decades. The Czech lands, politically and administratively subordinated provinces of Austria without any kind of cultural or political autonomy, flourished economically and culturally. The Czech provinces achieved by far the highest level of economic advancement in Central and Eastern Europe. Rapid and successful industrialization, social modernization, and the highest literacy rate in the region made the Czech lands more similar to the West than any other part of it. In other words, Bohemia and Moravia profited a great deal from being a hereditary province of the Habsburg empire and as a consequence enjoyed an equal status with Austria proper. Rapid economic progress certainly contributed to the further failure of Czech national demands during the 1860s and 1870s. The boycott of the imperial Diet and Reichsrat in 1867 in favor of the reestablishment of the statni pravo, or a Rechtsstaat, that is, equal legal-political status with Hungary, was again rejected. The Bohemian Declaration of August 1868 that renewed this demand generated mass rallies of support around the country. The imperial cabinet of Count Karl Hohenwart was ready to accept the concept of a 'trialist' reorganization of the empire and granted cultural autonomy to the Czech people, although not equal status with Hungary, in the fall of 1871. Emperor Franz Josef, a hard-nosed defender of Austro-Hungarian 'dualism,' rejected the 'trialist' Austro-Hungarian-Slav concept, however, and dismissed the Hohenwart cabinet. The Bohemian and Moravian representatives in the imperial Diet renewed their boycott of it. As before, such passive resistance was ineffective. It did not shake the empire, and the prosperous Czech provinces were not ready for violence. The Moravian Czechs gave up the boycott in 1873, and a split in the Czech national movement in September 1874 led to the reentry of the 'Young Czechs,' a newly organized National Liberal party, into parliament. In the fall of 1878, even the 'Old Czech' National party joined. The peaceful Czech national movement lost momentum and dried up for several decades. 'Organic work' nevertheless became more vigorous and successful than ever.

We went from Greece to Macedonia, and then to Serbia, Hungary, and Austria before reaching Germany.

Putin started spending hundreds of millions of dollars creating and running government-funded think tanks, foundations, and thinly disguised nongovernmental organizations, establishing branch offices for information warfare throughout Europe, seeking to shape public opinion and to co-opt Western experts, academics, and politicians. The Kremlin began cultivating relationships with right-wing political activists in Austria, Hungary, Italy, France, Germany, Britain, and across the Atlantic in America. It would support the far right and the far left simultaneously, so long as they were fighting one another or attacking a common enemy. To divide and conquer was a glorious goal—but to divide would do.

The Industrial Revolution created a transformative critical juncture for the whole world during the nineteenth century and beyond: those societies that allowed and incentivized their citizens to invest in new technologies could grow rapidly. But many around the world failed to do so—or explicitly chose not to do so. Nations under the grip of extractive political and economic institutions did not generate such incentives. Spain and Ethiopia provide examples where the absolutist control of political institutions and the implied extractive economic institutions choked economic incentives long before the dawn of the nineteenth century. The outcome was similar in other absolutist regimes—for example, in Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and China, though in these cases the rulers, because of fear of creative destruction, not only neglected to encourage economic progress but also took explicit steps to block the spread of industry and the introduction of new technologies that would bring industrialization. Absolutism

All in all, French armies wrought much suffering in Europe, but they also radically changed the lay of the land. In much of Europe, gone were feudal relations; the power of the guilds; the absolutist control of monarchs and princes; the grip of the clergy on economic, social, and political power; and the foundation of ancien régime, which treated different people unequally based on their birth status. These changes created the type of inclusive economic institutions that would then allow industrialization to take root in these places. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization was rapidly under way in almost all the places that the French controlled, whereas places such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not conquer, or Poland and Spain, where French hold was temporary and limited, were still largely stagnant. S

Without the changes in political institutions and political power similar to those that emerged in England after 1688, there was little chance for absolutist countries to benefit from the innovations and new technologies of the Industrial Revolution. In Spain, for example, the lack of secure property rights and the widespread economic decline meant that people simply did not have the incentive to make the necessary investments and sacrifices. In Russia and Austria-Hungary, it wasn’t simply the neglect and mismanagement of the elites and the insidious economic slide under extractive institutions that prevented industrialization; instead, the rulers actively blocked any attempt to introduce these technologies and basic investments in infrastructure such as railroads that could have acted as their conduits. At

Nations sign treaties of cooperation, but even they arrive out of conflict. In case of conflict between two nations, they may seek friendship treaties or alliances with other powerful nations. Thus, when England, France and Russia learnt in the 1890s that Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy had aligned themselves against the other two (France and Russia), the former three nations entered into a counter alliance. During the Cold War period, several alliances were concluded by countries of the two blocs. While the Eastern Bloc countries were led by the former USSR, the Western Bloc came to be led by the United States. When in 1971 a war between India and Pakistan became imminent, and it became clear that the USA and China were likely to side with Pakistan, a treaty of friendship was concluded between India and the Soviet Union. This treaty acted as a deterrent, and Pakistan's friends did not side with it in the war. The idea of this discussion is that cooperation at political level between countries arises out of conflict. So, conflict is more important for international relations than cooperation among nations.

Aided and abetted by Austria-Hungary, Germany’s behaviour in July 1914 was the most important single factor in bringing about the First World War. The German leadership wanted hegemony in Europe and was prepared to go to war to achieve it. Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, the ‘war guilt clause’, which declared that the Great War was ‘imposed upon’ the Allies ‘by the aggression of Germany and her allies’ was, therefore, fundamentally correct.

The competitors of leftist revolutionaries in Italy, Austria, or Hungary after the First World War were not nineteenth-century English Tories or English liberals. It was preeminently the revolutionary Right that performed this oppositional function. Moreover, the fascists did not operate as merely partisan opposition, like Republicans in the United States or the Conservative Party in England. They represented the "political" in the sense in which Carl Schmitt applied that term, namely as an adversary in a life-and-death confrontation between sides that did not view themselves as debating teams on a TV news program.

In this new entity, known as Austria-Hungary or the Dual Monarchy, Jews were fully emancipated. In 1873, Buda and Pest merged to form the metropolis of Budapest, home to almost two hundred thousand people, of whom 16 percent were Jews.

Having risked the loss of Canada in order to conquer Silesia for the King of Prussia, France was to lose it finally in the next war for the pleasure of attempting to restore that province to the Queen of Hungary. France, having played the game of Prussia in the War of the Austrian Succession, was to play that of Austria in the Seven Years War.

This in turn reduces that country’s foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland and Estonia are 100 per cent reliant on Russian gas, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Lithuania are 80 per cent dependent, and Greece, Austria and Hungary 60 per cent. About half of Germany’s gas consumption comes from Russia, which, along with extensive trade deals, is partly why German politicians tend to be slower to criticise the Kremlin for aggressive behaviour than a country such as Britain, which not only has 13 per cent dependency, but also has its own gas-producing industry, including reserves of up to nine months’ supply.

The coast of Austria-Hungary yielded what people called cappuzzo, a leafy cabbage. It was a two-thousand-year-old grandparent of modern broccoli and cauliflower, that was neither charismatic nor particularly delicious. But something about it called to Fairchild. The people of Austria-Hungary ate it with enthusiasm, and not because it was good, but because it was there. While the villagers called it cappuzzo, the rest of the world would call it kale. And among its greatest attributes would be how simple it is to grow, sprouting in just its second season of life, and with such dense and bulky leaves that in the biggest challenge of farming it seemed to be how to make it stop growing. "The ease with which it is grown and its apparent favor among the common people this plant is worthy a trial in the Southern States," Fairchild jotted. It was prophetic, perhaps, considering his suggestion became reality. Kale's first stint of popularity came around the turn of the century, thanks to its horticultural hack: it drew salt into its body, preventing the mineralization of soil. Its next break came from its ornamental elegance---bunches of white, purple, or pink leaves that would enliven a drab garden. And then for decades, kale kept a low profile, its biggest consumers restaurants and caterers who used the cheap, bushy leaves to decorate their salad bars. Kale's final stroke of luck came sometime in the 1990s when chemists discovered it had more iron than beef, and more calcium, iron, and vitamin K than almost anything else that sprouts from soil. That was enough for it to enter the big leagues of nutrition, which invited public relations campaigns, celebrity endorsements, and morning-show cooking segments. American chefs experimented with the leaves in stews and soups, and when baked, as a substitute for potato chips. Eventually, medical researchers began to use it to counter words like "obesity," "diabetes," and "cancer." One imagines kale, a lifetime spent unnoticed, waking up one day to find itself captain of the football team.

The fascist solution of the impasse reached by liberal capitalism can be described as a reform of market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation of all democratic institutions, both in the industrial and the political realm. ... The appearance of such a movement in the industrial countries of the globe, and even in a number of only slightly industrialized ones, should never have been ascribed to local causes, national mentalities, or historical backgrounds as was so consistently done by contemporaries. Fascism had as little to do with the Great War as with the Versailles Treaty, with Junker militarism as with the Italian temperament. The movement appeared in defeated countries like Bulgaria and in victorious ones like Jugoslavia, in countries of Northern temperament like Finland and Norway and of Southern temperament like Italy and Spain, in countries of Aryan race like England, Ireland or Belgium and non-Aryan race like Japan, Hungary, or Palestine, in countries of Catholic traditions like Portugal and in Protestant ones like Holland, in soldierly communities like Prussia and civilian ones like Austria, in old cultures like France and new ones like the United States and the Latin-American countries. In fact, there was no type of background -- of religious, cultural, or national tradition -- that made a country immune to fascism, once the conditions for its emergence were given.

By the 1980s, Gorbachev’s efforts to reinvigorate the idea of a “single culture of the Soviet people, socialist in content, diverse in its national forms, internationalist in spirit” faltered against the fact that nationalism had acquired meaningful content to Soviet citizens in a way that socialist internationalism had not.49 For seventy years, the carrot of Soviet-style “internationalism” and the stick of Soviet repression had squelched demands for independence while promoting nationalism in other ways. This combination had prevented the breakup of the multinational empire, which otherwise would probably have collapsed after World War I, along with Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. With repression now eased, “openness” and “restructuring” were about to launch the Soviet Union, too, into a new world of identity politics. Moscow found itself faced with the choice between “nativized” elites, who were corrupt but loyal to Soviet “internationalism,” and alternative leaders in the republics, who were nationalists and not loyal to the Soviet Union.

Americans across the worldview spectrum succumb to their basest survival instincts under such circumstances. So, it seems, do people the world over. Europe, like the United States, recently has seen the rise of right-wing populist leaders railing against immigration, European integration, and open borders. And sure enough, the same four parenting questions that reveal so much about Americans’ political preferences also explain a lot about what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic. Worldview was central to the Brexit vote in Britain. It is also central to support for right-wing parties like France’s National Front and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party. The same is happening in places as diverse as Hungary, Poland, Austria, and Denmark. Whether the influx of immigrants is objectively more like a trickle or a torrent, citizens of all these places perceive a flood pouring into their countries with the potential to change their culture, a dynamic that heightens the appeal of any leader who promises to Make (insert country name) Great Again.

The time-staggered nature of the industrialization process—from Britain to Germany to Russia and northwestern Europe and Japan to Korea to Canada and Spain—combined with the steadily accelerating nature of that process, means that much of the world’s population faces mass retirements followed by population crashes at roughly the same time. The world’s demographic structure passed the point of no return twenty to forty years ago. The 2020s are the decade when it all breaks apart. For countries as varied as China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Ukraine, Canada, Malaysia, Taiwan, Romania, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria, the question isn’t when these countries will age into demographic obsolescence. All will see their worker cadres pass into mass retirement in the 2020s. None have sufficient young people to even pretend to regenerate their populations. All suffer from terminal demographics. The real questions are how and how soon do their societies crack apart? And do they deflate in silence or lash out against the dying of the light? Coming up behind them—rapidly—is another cadre of countries whose birth rates have dropped even faster, and so who will face a similar demographic disintegration in the 2030s and 2040s: Brazil, Spain, Thailand, Poland, Australia, Cuba, Greece, Portugal, Hungary, and Switzerland.

When emerging markets cannot pay foreign debts, options vanish. Unavoidable defaults shut off access to global capital markets. Without access to capital, economies contract. Local currency becomes worthless. Printing more money invites inflation and hyperinflation. Poverty proliferates. Governments that cannot provide for their populations do not last long. Chaos opens the door to empty promises by authoritarians armed with populist slogans and freelance militias. Advanced economies are not invulnerable, as history has shown repeatedly. It’s worth noting that in 1899 cautious investors sought safety in one-hundred-year bonds issued by the Habsburg Empire that ruled Austria-Hungary. When the anarchist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Austria’s archduke Ferdinand in June 1914, an act that ignited World War I, sovereign Habsburg bonds were still holding their value relative to other European bonds. In other words, no experts saw the end coming. Within four years, the Habsburg Empire was history. Two decades later, the postwar debt and reparations bills that nearly smothered Germany helped usher in World War II.

Russia’s allies Britain and France had also declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary. World War I had begun.

Austria-Hungary, backed by its ally the German Empire, declared war on Serbia.

The gardens are scented with lilac and acacia trees, and the ground is sandy and soft,

bouquet of jasmine

The moonlight made the room bright as day.

FOR EVERY PERSON ACQUAINTED WITH LUDWIG there exists a theory as to the cause of his death.

Sisi indicates the blousy white blossoms, shadowed in pink: “Magnolia.

It’s like trying to keep a cork in a champagne bottle,

Church bells toll, reminding people to pray for Ludwig’s soul.

What they see, before the body slips from their grasp, are the whites of Ludwig’s eyes, his mouth stretched into a howl.

A panic blooms inside Ida.

If Ludwig’s life could be made up of only moments like this, he … would probably still find a way to be unhappy.

his jacket turned inside out on dry land missing a bullet hole’s worth of fabric,

delicate white buds

with such steady grace that Ludwig imagines a spider descending its silk.

different kind of uprooting took place in eastern Europe, where enlightenment and emancipation advanced more slowly. There, in the sprawling Russian Empire, the significant movement at hand was not from one religion to another, but rather physical movement in the form of mass exodus. The conventionally assumed trigger point was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, in the wake of which a wave of violent pogroms directed against Jews broke out in Russia. It was at this time that the first of the huge waves of Jewish emigration from eastern Europe occurred, laying the ground for yet another rebalancing of the global Jewish population. It is estimated that almost 4 million Jews left Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Romania between 1880 and 1929, nearly two-thirds of whom came to the United States, which was now transformed

The Uskoks – like reformed alcoholics brought face to face with row upon row of brightly coloured liqueur miniatures – were simply unable to avoid helping themselves to passing Venetian Christian ships.

The wind blows the straw from her hair and the wrinkles from her dress,

recoiling as if their touch scalds his delicate skin.

Sisi’s ego bruises easily.

If the European Civil War is to end with France and Italy abusing their momentary victorious power to destroy Germany and Austria-Hungary now prostrate, they invite their own destruction also, being so deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and economic bonds.

Sisi had shown signs of this melancholy strain. If she had been colicky, that would have been one thing, but the infant Sisi fussed silently—often refusing to eat, sleeping far less than her brothers and sisters did, never wanting to be held.

That is the word that everyone uses—“eccentricity”—though the tone with which the word is spoken always lines the word with an omen.

The disgusting trail should serve as a lesson to his parents, but it’s the servants who will have to clean it up, so no one learns a thing from this cruel attempt at discipline.

The city attempts to match the beauty of its new Empress.

Sisi pouts at not even having managed to annoy him.

Sisi arrives to the family party in her new blush moire dress and a mood.

Here is one more thing that Sisi is allowed to look at, but not to touch, one more thing she used to hold close that is now at arm’s length.

Sisi’s mother hugs her and tells her she’s perfect, but perfect is not what Sisi has ever wanted to be.

She tries to work out an equation in her head that explains how much each of these loves relies on the other, but she has never been taught math, so it’s a lost cause.

The heart of the matter’, it has been said, ‘was simply that Austria-Hungary was trying to act the part of a great power with the resources of a second-rank one.’81 The desperate efforts to be strong on all fronts ran a serious risk of making the empire weak everywhere; at the very least, they placed superhuman demands upon the empire’s railway system, and upon the staff officers who would control it. More than that, these operational dilemmas confirmed what most observers in Vienna had reluctantly accepted since 1870: that in the event of a Great Power war, Austria-Hungary needed German support.

The time of Kafka's novel is the time of a humanity that has lost its continuity with humanity, of a human­ity that no longer knows anything and no longer remembers anything and lives in cities without names where the streets are without names or with names dif­ferent from those they had yesterday, because a name is continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name. ... The street Tamina was born on was called Schwerinova Street. That was during the war, when Prague was occupied by the Germans. Her father was born on Cernokostelecka Avenue. That was under Austria-Hungary. When her mother married her father and moved in there, it was Marshal Foch Avenue. That was after the 1914-1918 war. Tamina spent her child­hood on Stalin Avenue, and it was on Vinohrady Avenue that her husband picked her up to take her to her new home. And yet it was always the same street, they just kept changing its name, brainwashing it into a half-wit.

Loneliness is keenest when in the company of others, when comparisons suggest that everyone else is relating to and forming bonds with one another ... To make a connection requires risking rejection. To share a story requires an audience trustworthy enough to receive it. The longer a person remains isolated, the more sensitive they become to potential threats. The longer a story goes untold, the harder it gets to tell.

A brief autumn stroll” (einen kleinen Herbstspaziergang) was what staffers in Sarajevo, singing the tune of jingoistic journalists and politicians throughout the Dual Monarchy, expected once the troops crossed into Serbia, a rosy assessment shared even by many well-placed functionaries in Vienna. “We’ll be able to chase off the Serbs with a wet rag,” promised Lt. Col. Purtscher, chief of the Balkan operations group on the General Staff.

Herzl preferred an entirely different solution to the problem of antisemitism in Austria-Hungary, involving not the reconfiguration of society so much as the reconfiguration of the Jews themselves. Austria’s Jews, he wrote in January of 1893, must undergo complete assimilation, up to and including intermarriage and baptism. At the same time, they must win the respect of Gentiles by fighting for their honor: “Half a dozen duels will do a great deal to improve the position of Jews in society.

In the evening almost the whole transport received soup and bread. Everybody was crying with happiness and saying, “We came through Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, France and nowhere did anyone see us! Only in Czechoslovakia the people have heart . . . We will never forget Horní Bříza.”’ Klara Löffová said, ‘The whole village came with soup and bread . . . It seemed like a miracle

An example to humanity. Israel, Germany, Spain, France, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Russia, Argentina, Mexico, Japan, China, Korea, South Africa, Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Slovakia, Colombia, Austria, Switzerland, Cyprus, Belarus, Czech Republic, Greece, Turkey, Venezuela, Portugal, Hungary, Australia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines and New Zealand.

it is difficult not to wonder what the outcome would have been if the Entente had simply held its ground in France and Belgium and tackled Germany and Austria-Hungary by sending every piece of kit they could spare to the Russians - which is not unlike what happened until 1944 in the Second World War.

This view - that Germany was not responsible for the outbreak of war - was maintained for the next two decades, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and was only finally refuted by the extensive researches made into the Wilhelmine archives at Potsdam by Professor Fritz Fischer, research which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Germany had been planning a major European war for years and saw the Sarajevo incident, and the subsequent reactions of Austria-Hungary and Serbia, as a chance to start it.

Let us imagine a lateral world, set only infinitesimally to the side of the one we think we know, in which just this has come to pass. The British people suffer beneath a Tory despotism of previously unimagined rigor and cruelty. Under military rule, Ireland has become a literal shambles—Catholics of any worth or ability are routinely identified when young, and imprisoned or assassinated forthwith. Orange Lodges are ubiquitous, and every neighborhood is administered from one. A sort of grim counter-Christmas runs from the first to the twelfth of July, anniversaries of the Boyne and Aughrim. France, southern Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia have combined in a protective League of Europe, intended to keep Britain an outcast from the community of nations. Her only ally is the U.S., which has become a sort of faithful sidekick, run basically by the Bank of England and the gold standard. India and the colonies are if possible worse off than they were.

As for international law, the prevailing conception of national sovereignty gave the governments of Nazi Germany and other Axis states virtually unlimited authority over their own populations. Jews and so-called stateless refugees in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Romania enjoyed no real protection, under international law, from persecution by the governments of those countries.

In the Chronicles of the Anabaptists in Austria-Hungary, one of them writes: “The foundations of the Christian faith were laid by the Apostles here and there in different countries, but through tyranny and false teaching, suffered many a blow and hindrance, the Church being often so diminished that it could scarcely be seen whether a Church existed at all. As Elias said, the altars were broken down, the prophets slain, and he remained alone; but God did not let His Church disappear altogether. Otherwise this article of the Christian faith would have been proved false: ‘I believe there is one Christian Church, one fellowship of the saints.’ If she could not be pointed out with the finger, if at times scarcely two or three could be found, yet the Lord, according to His promise, has been with them, and because they remained true to His Word, has never forsaken them, but has increased and added to them, but when they became careless, forgetful of Christ’s goodness, God withdrew from them the gifts with which He had endowed them and awakened true men in other places, giving gifts to them, with which they again built up a church to the Lord. So the kingdom of Christ, from the Apostles’ time until now, has wandered from one nation to another, until it has come to us.

Otto von Bismarck knew this. He was Kaiser Wilhelm I’s strategist. Bismarck did a lot of complicated diplomatic maneuvering from 1870-90 to make sure Germany always had two major powers as allies: Russia and Austria-Hungary. Together, the three powers were the Three Emperors’ League.

By then the five major powers—Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary—were spending a massive $3 billion each month, nearly 50 percent of their collective GDP. No other war in history had absorbed so much of the wealth of so many nations at one time.

When I’d previously asked Syrians where they wanted to end up, I drew a range of answers: Holland, perhaps, or Sweden, Austria or the UK. Now almost everyone says they just want to reach Germany. The pragmatism of the lower Balkan countries is also increasingly apparent. Having previously tried to block the path of refugees, or slow them down, Macedonia, Serbia and Greece have now bowed to the inevitable and created a de facto humanitarian corridor to Hungary.

Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia would have been amusing if it had not had such tragic consequences. Since he had melodramatically closed his embassy in Belgrade, Berchtold found himself at a loss as to how to deliver the news to Serbia. Germany refused to be the emissary since it was still trying to give the impression that it did not know what Austria-Hungary was planning and so Berchtold resorted to sending an uncoded telegram to Paši?, the first time that war had been declared that way.

(Britain had 84 battleships and battlecruisers, including 35 modern battleships; compared, respectively, with Germany’s 48 and 20 and the United States’s 41 and 18. France, Japan, Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary trailed.)