Otto von Habsburg

After the end of the Cold War he could enjoy some vindication of his long struggle for a spirit of unity across the European continent, as personal contact with ancestral Habsburg lands became possible once more.

In many other ways, however, the changes of the 1990s and beyond illustrated how far the world had moved from the creaking grandeur of the Austro-Hungarian empire into whose ruling family Otto was born in 1912. He was the first child of the Archduke Charles Habsburg and his wife, Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma. His full name — Franz Josef, Otto, Robert, Maria Antonia, Karl Maximilian, Henry, Sixtus Xavier, Felix, Rene, Ludwig, Gaetus, Pius, Ignateus — was a kind of caricature of the extraordinary Habsburg inheritance of dynastic alliance and general historical baggage. That he was to use for most of his life simply the first name Otto was appropriate for the much more modest position history would allow him to occupy.

The prestige of the Habsburg court at the time of Otto’s birth centred on the towering figure of his great-great-uncle, the Emperor Franz-Josef, ruler since 1848, a figure whose longevity seemed to symbolise the dynasty’s ability to weather all the turbulence generated by its volatile peoples and territories spread around central Europe. But the final years of Franz-Josef’s rule hinted at the cataclysm to come, and pitched Otto’s family into the centre of the struggle for Habsburg survival.

The assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo in June 1914, was one of the truly fateful events of European history, setting in motion the diplomatic as well as military march towards the First World War. It also made Otto’s father Habsburg heir apparent decades before he had expected, and in such alarming circumstances.

Two years later Emperor Franz Josef died. Pictures of his funeral in November 1916 — the end, everyone sensed, of the old Habsburg era — show 4-year-old Crown Prince Otto making his first public appearance. He walked white-suited in solemn procession, next to his mother shrouded in black and his father looking strained in military uniform. A few weeks later Otto posed in plush robes next to his parents in Budapest, heavy crowns perched on their heads, as they attended the separate coronation ceremony demanded by Hungary’s membership of the Habsburg empire as a proudly separate kingdom.

But within two years the Habsburg armies and their allies in the war were facing defeat; peoples of the empire such as the Czechs were moving towards independence, and in Austria itself the imperial family had few stalwart defenders left. Otto’s family fled Vienna, and after brief stays in Hungary and in rural Austria they were escorted, with the help of a British officer, to Switzerland to begin the long years of shifting exile. It was a bitter humiliation, but at least they had escaped the fate of other imperial families such as the Romanovs, murdered in Russia.

Otto’s father Charles made brief but futile attempts to recover at least his Hungarian crown. He died in 1922 in his latest place of exile, Madeira. The family had little to live on, and at the funeral the man who four years before had been emperor in Vienna was laid to rest in a plain coffin pulled on a hand cart.Otto, then 10 and referred to as “your majesty” by the tiny exiled court, sought to live up to his father’s plea that he continue to feel a sense of responsibility for the peoples his family had once ruled.

His mother prepared him for this role with a formidable educational routine in the years that followed, including learning all the main languages of the old empire. But the first and greatest political challenge for Otto as he entered adult life concerned his home country, Austria, as it fell under the Nazi spell in the 1930s.

While some Austrians were proudly republican patriots, and others felt at least some nostalgic regard for the Habsburg past, an ever increasing group were attracted by that other pole of Austrian identity — the dream of Germanic unity, given dynamic new impetus by the rise to power in Germany of the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler.

Otto, by this time living in Belgium, watched as weak governments in Vienna were destabilised or manipulated by Nazi sympathisers. He had seen something of Nazism at first hand, having spent the winter of 1932-33 studying in Berlin. But he declined an invitation to meet Hitler. “I had the great advantage of having already read Mein Kampf from start to finish and knew what his aims were,” he later recalled. He knew in particular that on page one of that book Hitler had stated: “German Austria must return to the great German motherland.”

There seemed, however, little the exiled Otto could do as Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss was murdered by Nazi sympathisers in 1934, and then his successor Schuschnigg was subjected to ever more crude intimidation by Berlin. Schuschnigg was never the most decisive of characters, but had strong Austrian patriotic instincts and contemplated a renewed Habsburg role as counter to the lure of Germany. He met Otto secretly in 1935 and promised, according to Otto’s record of the event, “to carry out the restoration as soon as possible ... even if this should lead to a serious European conflagration”.

However, Schuschnigg’s stomach for the fight was less in evidence as Hitler increased the pressure in 1938. When the Anschluss appeared imminent Otto smuggled a letter to Schuschnigg in which he offered to take over the Chancellorship “so that we could gain the same advantages achievable through a formal restoration of the Monarchy”. He was not acting, Otto claimed, due to “the hunger for power of an ambitious young man” but rather because “I see it as my duty that, when Austria is in peril, I, as the heir to the House of Austria, should stand or fall with my country.”

When Schuschnigg declined this offer and a Nazi takeover seemed imminent, Otto proposed to his family a last, desperate gesture, in which he would fly to Vienna and hope his people would rally round. His mother persuaded him that this would most likely lead to his ignominious death, so he watched from afar as Hitler and his armies marched into Austria in triumphant expansion of the Reich.

Most galling of all for Otto was the enthusiasm with which so many Austrians greeted their new Führer — an enthusiasm which made it much harder to argue that his country was a victim of Nazism and at root still loyal to the old Habsburg identity. Otto tried to use his diplomatic skills to keep an independent Austrian spirit alive, first in western Europe and then, after fleeing before advancing Nazi armies, in the more distant exile of the US. He enjoyed a personal rapport with President Roosevelt but still found it hard to match the impact of other exiled groups such as the Poles and the Czechs. He also found himself wasting much time on the interminable bickering of exiled Austrian politicians.

After the defeat of Nazism the old imperial world seemed more distant than ever. Otto was still banned from the newly restored Austrian republic, under strong Soviet influence in the first postwar decade. Only in the 1960s was he able to reach an awkward compromise whereby he was allowed to visit Austria again, having renounced various claims.

He kept his permanent home in Bavaria, where he had settled after the war and begun to raise a large family after marrying, with suitably aristocratic discernment, Regina of Sachsen-Meiningen. He made a living from lecturing and journalism and then from 1979 as a member of the European Parliament, from which platform he could develop ideas of a kind of spiritual unity of Europe, constantly reminding his fellow MEPs that Europe remained artificially divided by the Iron Curtain. When that Curtain fell apart in the late 1980s there were opportunities for nostalgic visits to old Habsburg centres such as Budapest and some renewed political prestige. Otto’s second son, Georg, even became Hungary’s Ambassador to the EU.

In other respects, however, attempts to revive family influence were less successful or dignified. Otto’s oldest son Karl became a gameshow host on Austrian TV and then suffered much political embarrassment as he was linked to financial scandals and associated with the far-right extremism of Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party.

Otto retained a huge private network of political contacts. The Habsburg name could still open doors, but the doors were opened discreetly. He could never make the public and permanent impact on European political life that he felt his family background merited.

As his friend and biographer Gordon Brook-Shepherd put it, “he always stood in the wings of great events”. That first public appearance in 1916, walking in Franz-Josef’s funeral procession, had begun the Habsburg move away from the centre stage, however eloquently Otto strove to keep the Habsburg voice audible in European political life.

Otto von Habsburg, European politician, was born on November 20, 1912. He died on July 4, 2011, aged 98