THE HABSBURG TWILIGHT: Tales from Vienna

by Sarah Gainham ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 18, 1979

Sarah Gainham, author of Night Falls on the City and other novels of Vienna, lays claim to very definite and dissenting opinions about the ""twilight"" of the Habsburgs. She believes that the notion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's long and irreversible decline was a rationale concocted by politicians to account for the Central European disasters after 1919. The Empire was an extremely vital and going concern, she holds, a society that attempted to implement universal manhood suffrage before any other major European power, a monarchy that permitted an unusual degree of social mobility, and, finally, a multinational state with tremendous cultural energy. These views, however, are no longer novel or unpopular; and so the tension she attempts to make the focus of her work is quite artificial. Nonetheless the eight sketches of celebrities from the Empire's last decades do gain from her combative style: she highlights unusual facts about her subjects' lives with the passion of a crusader lifting the veil from some hidden truth. Franz Joseph, she says, was no martinet, but a shy and uncertain man (at least in private matters), neither cold nor humorless, but himself deeply in love with two women--his wife and Katharina Schratt, one of Vienna's foremost actresses. Gustav Mahler was a living embodiment of a career carved by talent--a man who rose from grandchild of a ragpicker to emperor of the Imperial Opera. Gainham handles the racy details with taste and considerable skill, and although she has nary a footnote, she obviously has done her homework. And where the facts stop, she draws boldly and sensitively upon her own experience. Writing of Mary Vetsera, the victim of Crown Prince Rudolf's suicidal morbidity, she recalls herself as ""a wildly undisciplined and emotional girl of eighteen"" and on that basis discounts the notion that Mary Vetsera ""actually envisaged her own death."" Her portraits of Herzl, Klimt, and Karl Lueger are discerning, the tale of Anna Sacher and the Hotel Sachet is a delight. True, the reader sometimes misses the other side of that world--Musil's side, and Schweik's--but Gainham's affirmative view has a life of its own.

Pub Date: May 18, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION