Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

In the aftermath of Tegetthoff’s early death, a ship was named after him and, in a final gesture of global ambition, sent up to the Arctic. In an epic of futility and ice its crew discovered a genuinely pointless archipelago now proudly named Franz Joseph Land. In the century since the Habsburg Empire came to an end, workmen across Central Europe have been busily engaged in taking down any mention of Franz Joseph on countless statues, plaques and street names across the former Empire and it is at the very least odd that the largest-scale use of Franz Joseph’s name survives in an area so remote that even its Soviet owners could never be bothered to change it. So the inheritors of the bold, imperialist and naval future for the Habsburgs were not the Venetians, and certainly not the Mexicans, but a few baffled and perhaps quietly loyal seasonal walruses.