Hapsburgs: A Dynasty Rises Anew

Let’s assume for a moment, just for the fun of it, that a direct descendant of George III has shown up in Los Angeles. George III, you’ll recall, was on the throne when the American colonies won their independence from Britain.

Now, suppose this royal newcomer just happens to use his famous ancestor’s name: George of Great Britain. The first thing he does when he hits town is take an executive position at one of the major studios, a job he promptly turns into a bully pulpit for his political views. He marries an imported German duchess; next, he is named a U.S. ambassador at large. People start in with “Hail the king!” when he cruises Rodeo Drive. When journalists invite his views on the resurrection of the monarchy, he responds with a tantalizing “Never say never.”

Wouldn’t all that strike you as just the tiniest bit odd?

In fact, that’s more or less the spectacle that Hungarians have been enjoying in their newly democratic homeland ever since Gyorgy von Hapsburg blew into town and started carving out niches for himself in the nation’s business, diplomatic and society circles. Gyorgy, you see, is a member of the House of Hapsburg, one of the greatest sovereign dynasties of Europe until its empire was dismantled eight decades ago.

And it’s not only 33-year-old Gyorgy: From Scandinavia to the southernmost reaches of the changing and unsettled continent that is post-Cold War Europe, Hapsburgs are turning up in interesting and unexpected places, positing the idea that their family’s imperial history holds answers to some of the most pressing questions of modern times.

Hapsburgs are keeping up the age-old family tradition of strategic marriage, tantalizing monarchical revivalists and striving through electoral politics to shape the development of the continent, which is inching toward unification.

“My brother is doing the same that I am doing,” Gyorgy said, referring to Karl Hapsburg-Lothringen, 37, who represents Austria in the European Parliament. “My sister is doing the same in Sweden. If everything goes right, she will be elected to the European Parliament. My sister in Spain is very much interested in local politics.”

It may be a measure of just how awful things were in Eastern Europe under communism, and the Nazi occupation that preceded it, that many people here are embracing a scion of the so-called dual monarchy that, from Vienna, kept Hungary very much in a second-class role during its reign. But embrace Gyorgy they do.

“Whenever the prince”--Gyorgy, that is--”comes to the Buda castle district, people begin shouting, ‘Hail the king! Hail the king!’ ” said Istvan Kiszely, vice mayor of a Budapest borough. “People do say it, even though it is never reported in the press.”

Family’s Reach Went as Far as Mexico

Back in their imperial heyday, the Hapsburgs ruled across this continent and beyond, from what is now Ukraine to deep into Croatia. The Holy Roman Empire was once headed by a Hapsburg. The family threw its weight around as far away as Latin America, thanks to an Iberian branch. If certain buildings in Mexico City look like weird transplants from Old Vienna, they were meant to: Maximilian, who ruled Mexico from 1864 to 1867, was a Hapsburg.

All that power and grandeur imploded in 1914, when Gyorgy von Hapsburg’s ancestor the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. After the cascade of repercussions we now call World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled by the Treaty of Versailles. Subsequent attempts by Hapsburgs to restore it failed--otherwise, today Gyorgy von Hapsburg would be second in line to the double-eagle throne.

Instead, he is second in line at MTM-SBS Television, Hungary’s first nationwide private television network. Gyorgy is also director of MTM Communications, the biggest film producer and distributor in Central Europe.

A fit life for a commoner in democratic Hungary? Well . . . not quite. Although Hapsburg works for a living, his day-to-day activities exude an unmistakable aroma of power and politics.

There he is, amid the “Wheel of Fortune” and “Let’s Make a Deal” reruns that pay the rent at MTM, stumping on the airwaves for North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership for this former Warsaw Pact state. Hungary’s formerly Communist prime minister has named him ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary, charged with ensuring early membership for this country in the European Union as it expands into the former East Bloc.

“You don’t have to be emperor to be useful,” said Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke’s Peerage, the standard reference work on royal bloodlines in Europe. Brooks-Baker, a monarchist, approves thoroughly of the Hapsburgs and their efforts to shape post-imperial Europe.

“They feel they have a calling, the way the priest has a calling,” he said. “Public service does not require a throne.”

Nor is it just the monarchists who appreciate the Hapsburg touch. Last fall, when Gyorgy von Hapsburg wed Germany’s bejeweled Duchess Eilika von Oldenburg here, former senior Communists rushed to the basilica to pay tribute, rubbing shoulders most incongruously with the many crownless European monarchs and landless grandees among the guests.

“Never say never,” archduke-cum-media-exec Hapsburg says when asked if he can envision himself as Hungary’s king. “But not in the next 20 or 30 years.”

Comeback Hopes Center on Hungary

If the Hapsburgs were to mount a successful comeback anywhere, Brooks-Baker said, it would have to be in Hungary.

“What I can’t imagine is how it would come about,” he added, noting that royal restorations are usually brought about by coups, something totally out of keeping with the Hapsburg way of doing things.

As early as 1990, amid the ruins of communism in Eastern Europe, there were rumors that the Hapsburg family patriarch would return in triumph as president of Hungary. Otto von Hapsburg, 85, is the eldest son of King Charles IV of Hungary, who was also Emperor Charles I of Austria. Otto was just 6 when the empire collapsed; the family was banished, and he spent a childhood wandering from Switzerland to Madeira to Spain.

“It was almost a gypsy life,” he recalled, interviewed in Strasbourg, France, in his small, shared office at the European Parliament, where he has represented the German state of Bavaria since 1979. The family was so destitute after its banishment that Otto waited until he was middle-aged to marry, Brooks-Baker said.

Otto von Hapsburg may have lost his titles, his possessions, his privileges--but never his sense of engagement in public life. He tried to become chancellor of Austria in the late 1930s, hoping to thwart annexation by Nazi Germany. He was condemned for high treason and immigrated to America; from there, he is credited with shrewdly using his contacts with Caribbean dictators to smuggle about 15,000 Jews out of wartime Europe. He formally renounced any claim to the throne in 1961.

Otto insisted that his seven children speak a different European language each day of the week; he catechized them in history, geography and religion; and he instilled in them a belief in a family destiny that predates the 20th century.

“Not many people have a thousand-year-old history,” Gyorgy Hapsburg said. “I have a thousand-year history, and I know what my ancestors did. And I know that carrying the name of Hapsburg, this very prestigious name, gives you a lot of possibilities, but it also gives you a big obligation.”

Clan Jumps at Chance to Return to Roots

In the summer of 1989, with Mikhail S. Gorbachev preaching perestroika in the Soviet Union and East Germans flocking to Hungary in hopes of finding an escape route to the West, members of the Hapsburg clan hastened from West Germany to the relatively open Austro-Hungarian border. The Hungarian government, in a spirit of openness and detente, had announced a one-day border opening at its checkpoint on the Vienna-Budapest highway. The Hapsburgs saw in the moment a chance to punch an even bigger hole in the Iron Curtain that was then running across their former realm.

A Hapsburg daughter took wire-cutters to the fencing. Bold and hopeful East Germans came rushing through to the West.

“This was a marvelous moment,” Otto von Hapsburg said.

The next year, son Gyorgy appeared in Hungary, at first as an organizer for his father’s travels into the newly opened East.

“I just liked it,” he recalled of his first trip to Budapest. “It wasn’t that my father said to me, ‘Son, you will go to Hungary; you are the Hungarian member of the family.’ I was intrigued by it. I felt comfortable here. I was fascinated by the changes that were going on.”

And it soon started to bother Gyorgy that he spoke no Hungarian: “People [were] turning to me and wanting to talk, and I couldn’t answer,” he said. So, at age 29, he moved permanently to Budapest and immersed himself in the tough Finno-Ugric language. Today he speaks it fluently.

In 1995, he became director of MTM Communications, and in December 1996, Socialist Prime Minister Gyula Horn named him the ambassador at large for European integration. It was the first time a Hapsburg had held any public office in Hungary since 1918.

Horn, who served as foreign minister in Hungary’s last Communist government, has said he has no problems with vesting state power in a former class enemy. He said the young crownless archduke’s connections and polish will “help to enhance the reputation and image of Hungary.”

Nor does Gyorgy Hapsburg feel troubled about receiving his marching orders from a former top Communist.

“I am not helping Communists,” he said. “I am not helping conservatives. I am helping this country.”

While these events were unfolding in Budapest, brother Karl was exploding onto the scene in Vienna, the former ground zero of Hapsburg imperial power.

Karl Hapsburg first carved out a chatty, approachable image for himself in 1992 by hosting an Austrian television game show. The next year, he made a sensation by marrying the multimillionaire heiress and former party girl par excellence Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, daughter of British model Fiona Campbell and German steel magnate Baron Heinrich von Thyssen.

So far, so good. But how to launch a political career in a relatively touchy country where the constitution forbids members of your family from becoming president? Karl Hapsburg has finessed things for the time being by becoming a member of the European Parliament. He sits in Strasbourg, next to his father--the parliament has an alphabetical seating chart--and campaigns for an eventual change in the Austrian law.

Political Activities Raise Suspicions

But even this distant and limited political activity has roused suspicions on the Austrian left. Is Otto von Hapsburg, despite his own formal renunciation, plotting a Hapsburg renaissance through his elder son’s political activities?

Absurd, says the patriarch, but rumors persist. It doesn’t help much that Otto’s four brothers--three of them still living--never forfeited their claims to the throne, or that some Hapsburgs have been campaigning for the return of priceless Hapsburgian castles, estates, art objects and libraries that now belong to the Republic of Austria.

Son Karl also scoffs at the suspicions.

“We have been expropriated a couple of times in this century,” he said, referring to a string of confiscations that started in 1918. “It’s not my main goal to fight to get these [properties] back, when there are so many other interesting and important things to do.”

Instead, one of his central passions is to add Croatia and Macedonia, and later Ukraine and Moldova, to the exclusive list of states being considered for membership in the expanding European Union. The presence of Croatia and Macedonia in the EU would enhance the stability of the troubled Balkan region, he argues.

“We have to deal with all European countries if we want to deal with European enlargement,” he said. “Just as I didn’t accept the Iron Curtain as the border of Europe, I cannot accept a new kind of border” between European Union members and nonmembers.

But this is not a popular cause in Strasbourg, and it’s downright heresy in parts of the former Yugoslav federation. It was a Serb, remember, who assassinated the Hapsburg heir apparent in Sarajevo in 1914; Serbs revere the gunman as an anti-imperialist hero. When they listen to Karl Hapsburg today talking about bringing Croatia into an expanded European Union, all they hear is favoritism toward a hostile neighbor that was once loyal to the Hapsburg monarchy.

“I lecture a lot, and there’s always a ‘Serb on duty’ who wants to argue with me,” Karl Hapsburg said. “But I’m absolutely firm in my convictions.”

The way he sees it, experience from the age of empire shows that it’s possible to foster peaceful coexistence among disputatious nations--even in the Balkans. Why not take advantage of the wisdom the Hapsburgs and their thousand-year family history can offer?

“You can’t take everything,” he said, “but you can take certain elements which have worked.”

Berlin Bureau Chief Walsh reported from Strasbourg, and Johannesburg Bureau Chief Murphy, formerly in The Times’ Warsaw Bureau, reported from Budapest.

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Hapsburg Family Tree

Charles I: emperor of Austria 1916-1918, was married to the Empress Zita of Bourbon-Parma, who died in 1989.

Otto: born 1912, married to Regina von Sachsen-Meiningen, lives in Pocking, Germany

Adelheid (1914-1971)

Robert Karl Ludwig: born 1915, lives in Brussels

Felix Friedrich: born 1916, lives in Mexico

Karl Ludwig: born 1918, lives in Brussels

Rudolf Syringus: born 1919

Charlotte: born 1921

Elisabeth Charlotte (1922-1993)

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CHILDREN OF OTTO AND REGINA

Monika: born 1954, married to the Duke of San Angelo, lives in Balaguer, Spain; three children

Michaela: born 1954 (Monika’s twin), married to Eric Allen d’Antin, lives in Florida; two children

Andrea: born 1955, married to Eugen von Neipperg, lives in Schwaigern, Germany; five children

Gabriela: born 1956, married to Christian Meister, lives in Germany; three children

Walburga: born 1958, married to Archibald Douglas, lives in Sweden; one son

Karl: born 1961, married to Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, lives in Austria; two children

Gyorgy: born 1964, married to Eilika von Oldenburg, lives in Budapest, Hungary