Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

In the summer of 1914 Kaiser Wilhelm II and Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz arrived for a visit. This was one of the key meetings prior to the First World War and infuriatingly there is no clue at all as to what was discussed. Franz Ferdinand was against preventive war of any kind – well aware of Habsburg weakness, and impatient (by this time more than impatient) to carry out his internal reforms and regenerate the Empire as a great power on the modern German or American model. The three men, probably sitting in Franz Ferdinand’s ‘harem room’ with their cigars, would have had the most frank and interesting conversation imaginable, filled with random gusts of anti-British, anti-Russian and anti-French ranting with occasional polite pauses to allow Franz Ferdinand to be anti-Hungarian and anti-Serb. We would know so much more about the true parameters of the German–Habsburg relationship, which was to create the summer’s fatal dynamic, if there was only some kind of record.