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pearl35's review
4.0
Archduke Wilhem of Austria, son of Karl Stephan and Maria Theresia of Tuscany, came of age just before WWI, when his father was scheming to embrace a Polish identity and have his branch of the family become pre-eminent, if not independent as rulers of Poland, going so far as to marry his daughters to Lithuanian-Polish nobles. Independent, democratic Poland absolutely refused to consider this project after 1920, and Wilhelm personally switched his interest to the Ukraine, where he had served in the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI and occupied under his personal authority, Slavicizing himself into Василь Вишиваний--Basil the Embroidered. In the confused aftermath of the war, Wilhelm took money from German conservatives to fund a Ukrainian monarchist paramilitary (the Free Cossacks), which Polish and French intelligence considered capable of launching him onto a Ukrainian throne. The Soviets, as you might imagine, considered this a bad idea. Kicked out in 1922, he swanned around postwar Europe as a bisexual hedonist, fleeing Paris after a girlfriend was convicted of extortion, and falling in with Nazi fringe and picking up virulent antisemitism as of the mid 1930s (as well as encouragement for another Ukrainian project). In 1941, it was obvious that the Nazis intended to conquer the Ukraine, not let him rule it, so he joined British intelligence and later glommed on to French military intelligence funds to spy on the Soviets, whom he despised as having personally thwarted his birthright. SMERSH got hold of him in 1947, and with no western government willing to claim him, was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 25 years in a gulag, although he died before the sentence could be carried out (officially tuberculosis, more likely a pistol to the back of the head.)
cathiwarren's review
This book is the poster child for why people hate history. I love history...this almost made me change my mind.
abevigodless's review
5.0
This is one of the finest books I've read. Although it is nearly perfectly written, with an historian's skill channeling the fluxes of time into a sense of their proportion and unexpected continuity, frequent readers of biography might say that Wilhelm von Habsburg never takes his proper place at the center of this story, as, indeed, he never did in the story he fashioned for himself. But this points at one of the accomplishments of this book: to show how enmeshed its subject is in his time, how one life -- even an aristocratic one -- is buffeted and even overcome by events around him. This book is also, it should be said, a long lens with which to view the current unrest in Ukraine. A wonderful book.
jakub_oliver's review against another edition
5.0
This book is simply brilliant. Most history books are written in a very dry, academic style, which is at the best of times nothing more than interesting, and at the worst of times painfully boring. There are many which attempt to bring history to life by telling it like a story through the eyes of certain protagonists, and this is one of the few that really pulls it off.
It tells the story of the changing face of Europe in the 20th century through the eyes of Archduke Wilhelm von Habsburg. He grew up on the idyllic Adriatic island of Lošinj in a Europe dominated by Empires, fought in the first world war, and in 1917 and 1918, during the brief period of German victory in Eastern Europe, got tantalizingly close to his dream of becoming Ukraine's king. He spent the 1920s living a decedent life as a Parisian exile, the 1930s slowly turning into a fascist and the 1940s abandoning fascism and supporting allied espionage in the German Reich and later the Eastern Bloc until his death at the hands of the Soviets. A man made for a completely different world to the one he ended up in, whose life ended in tragedy as every one of his dreams and schemes, big and small, unravelled, and who never lived to see his ultimate dream of an independent Ukraine. This book puts all the dramatic change and tragic suffering of the 20th century into perspective brilliantly.
It tells the story of the changing face of Europe in the 20th century through the eyes of Archduke Wilhelm von Habsburg. He grew up on the idyllic Adriatic island of Lošinj in a Europe dominated by Empires, fought in the first world war, and in 1917 and 1918, during the brief period of German victory in Eastern Europe, got tantalizingly close to his dream of becoming Ukraine's king. He spent the 1920s living a decedent life as a Parisian exile, the 1930s slowly turning into a fascist and the 1940s abandoning fascism and supporting allied espionage in the German Reich and later the Eastern Bloc until his death at the hands of the Soviets. A man made for a completely different world to the one he ended up in, whose life ended in tragedy as every one of his dreams and schemes, big and small, unravelled, and who never lived to see his ultimate dream of an independent Ukraine. This book puts all the dramatic change and tragic suffering of the 20th century into perspective brilliantly.
jackiemann's review
3.0
I read this book for a class, so naturally I wasn't as invested in it as I usually am in books. Still, it wasn't as terrible as I feared it would be. Basically, it's the story of Wilhelm Habsburg, the air to a throne that no longer existed by the time he was in his twenties, and what he decided to do with the remainder of his life afterward. While there were times when the writing got a bit dull for me, mostly when the author was going into great political analysis or the like, there were also a few lines I liked and that even made me smile. One of these was this: "If we believe that the nation resides in the orderly recitations of history given to us by our leaders, then our story is over." There were other lines I liked better, but of course I can't recall them now. There were a few other interesting things, including that Marie Antoinette was originally a Habsburg and that Heineken (the beer brand), after years of fighting with the remaining Habsburg family, now uses that Habsburg crest as its symbol on every bottle of beer. Anyway, this wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but I wouldn't tell anyone I know to read it.