Thursday - June 05, 2008
HABSBURG EMPIRE, LAST ARMY VETERAN DIES AT AGE 107
Franz Künstler, popularly known as “The Emperor’s Last Soldier”, who was buried on Tuesday at Niederstetten, Baden-Wrttemberg in Germany, having died aged 107, was the last man to have served in the Austro-Hungarian army.
Emperor Charles I of Austria
Emperor Charles: the last Habsburg rulerIn February 1918, at 17 years of age, he was drafted into the 1st Artillery Regiment of the Hungarian Army, in the service of Emperor Charles, the last Habsburg ruler, and served on the Italian front at Piave.
After the fall of the Dual Monarchy later that year he fought against the Communists before returning to civilian life in 1921.
Up to his death he worked as a museum guide and he was the oldest man in Germany. He lived to see his former commander-in-chief, Emperor Charles of Austria, beatified by the Pope.
Such small, personal milestones in history mark our diminishing connection with the past. The fall of the Habsburg Empire was a catastrophe for European civilisation.
For Austria it meant virtual extinction: that country surfaces only fitfully in international consciousness when a man imprisons his daughter in a cellar. It is a far cry from the glories of the Schnbrunn Palace, the court balls, the colourful parades celebrating an empire forged not by conquest but by marriage.
The dark forces of nationalism that dismembered Austria-Hungary (sanitised in American ideology at the Versailles peace conference as “self-determination”, in reality incipient Nazism) have been supplanted by an equally sinister supranationalism in the shape of the European Union.
Brussels was once ruled by the Habsburgs; today Vienna is a dependency of Brussels. The vulgarity and corruption of the EU testifies to how far Europe has sunk from its zenith under glittering monarchies such as the Bourbons and Habsburgs.
The only Nazi law the Austrian republic did not repeal was the one dispossessing the Habsburg family of its property. Britain shamefully backed America in preventing the restoration of Emperor Charles as King of Hungary in 1921 (apparently the western democracies preferred the Horthy dictatorship).
Nostalgia for the Habsburgs inspired at least one literary masterpiece: The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth’s incredibly evocative but melancholy re-creation of the last days of the Empire that the recently deceased Franz Künstler served. Hoch Habsburg!
Posted by Drew458
on 06/05/2008 at 09:48 AM
Filed Under: • History •
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