Introduction: The “What If?” Dilemma in Late Habsburg History

In 1909, at age forty-six, Franz Ferdinand made a decision about his death that would shape the memory of his life: he would be buried beside his morganatic wife, Sophie Chotek, at his palace in Artstetten (Lower Austria). That may not seem like much from the perspective of our own era. But in the context of the 600-year-old tradition-bound Habsburg dynasty, and in view of the archduke's exalted place in it as nephew of the near octogenarian emperor and next in line for the imperial throne, it was pure rebellion. For what the successor had also determined was where he would not be interred—with his esteemed ancestors in Vienna's Kaisergruft (Kaiser Crypt), which was strictly off-limits to lesser nobility like the Duchess of Hohenberg.Footnote ²

Franz Ferdinand's decision came from love for his wife, rather than from any lack of regal airs or ambition. In fact, his corpse would have found good company among forbears like the “enlightened absolutist” Joseph II (r. 1780–1790), whose reforms in everything from taxation to religious toleration had aimed to unite his realm under a more uniform, centralized and, in the language of the age, rational rule. For his own epoch, the archduke was also planning reforms to combat the centrifugal forces of secular nationalism that threatened to pull apart the imperial Crownlands and, the heir feared, push Europe's great powers into a war that Austria-Hungary could never survive.Footnote ³

The archduke's model, however, was Franz I (r. 1804–1835), the monarch who reconsolidated the regime following Napoleon's dismemberment of the Habsburg-ruled Holy Roman Empire. In his “Program for the Change of Rule,” the successor stipulated that he would ascend the throne as Franz II rather than Franz Ferdinand I, thus constructing a “self-narrative.”Footnote ⁴ The tragedy, of course, is that the archduke would be dead before the narrative he longed to be remembered by could actually be embarked upon. The irony, however, is still harsher: his death would always be associated with the war that, as he had warned, the monarchy did not survive.

Franz Ferdinand's entire life was shot through with such paradox. The successor who placed private feeling before family custom and called Habsburg rulership a “crown of thorns” also staked his legacy upon assuring the continuity of the imperial patrimony.Footnote ⁵ Some scholars have even argued that the archduke was targeted for that very reason, because Serbian nationalists feared that he might succeed in his reform plans, thus undermining their own political ambitions.Footnote ⁶ Was Franz Ferdinand truly the man to steady the monarchy? Did he possess the precise blend of personal and political acumen needed to push through the “serious organizational change” essential to satisfying the national aspirations of broad sectors of the diverse population?Footnote ⁷ Or rather, was the multinational state “increasingly becoming an anachronism, its political structure almost preserving a kind of exoticism that hardly anyone outside of Austria-Hungary understood”?Footnote ⁸ Was the conservative and authoritarian-minded archduke so distant from his own era of democratization and nation-state building that he simply “would have succumbed beneath [the Empire's] ruins”?Footnote ⁹

This question, though counterfactual, dominates the historiography around Franz Ferdinand. After all, everything his life had been leading to was killed off as quickly as he was on 28 June 1914. It is no wonder that so many works on the Successor—both critical and popular—carry such titles as The Obstructed Sovereign, “Stymied Savior?”, The Hindered Dynasty, and Europe's Lost Hope.Footnote ¹⁰ And no wonder, too, that when a scholar of Robert Kann's stature refers to his subject as “this potentially great and genuinely tragic personality,” it is hard to write about him without considering the empire's future had Franz Ferdinand come to power.Footnote ¹¹

This article takes a different tack to exploring the archduke's legacy. Starting from the premise that we know how Franz Ferdinand had hoped to be remembered, the question here is: How has he been remembered? Unlike the qualitative historical inquiry that entails turning over the heir's evolving political plans, probing his difficult personality, and then analyzing it all in the context of late imperial Habsburg problems, memory concerns itself with how a particular group has come to contemplate an event, place, or, in this case, person. Thus, whereas the historian formulates his/her judgment based on the evidence examined, memory studies are bound to the pluralistic bodies that do the remembering—what Maurice Halbwachs called the “structures of shared concerns, values, experiences, narratives.” Because memory is situated in social structures, which are in turn shaped by shifting political and cultural currents, studying it takes us in a different, though by no means disconnected, direction from history. In Franz Ferdinand's case, it enables us to interrogate the extent to which his presumed role as the empire's reformer figures into the means by which he has been remembered.Footnote ¹²

To whose memory do we refer? Which collectivity would be most compelling for reflecting upon the archduke's disrupted life? Although all peoples of the former monarchy construct their identities in part through the prism of their imperial past, for no postwar nation was the dynasty's collapse more disorienting than the people who became known after 1918 as Austrians. As a former part of a vast empire, the new postwar Austrian state of some 6.2 million people had to redefine a place for itself in Europe. What this meant for ordinary Austrians was no less than a collective identity crisis: Were they actually ethnic Germans whose best hope for a secure future lay in union (Anschluss) with their powerful neighbor to the north? Or did this new “Austria” embody a distinct ethnonational identity to be conserved and cultivated in an independent entity, however diminished and vulnerable? Regardless of how any one ideological group or individual Austrian answered this question, it required engaging with their long past as part of the Habsburg imperium.

During the First Republic, when the victorious Entente powers expressly forbade Anschluss, most Austrians nevertheless saw it as the best solution to their political predicament.Footnote ¹³ With the emergence of the Ständestaat (the Austro-Fascist “corporate state”) from 1933 to 1938, however, the newly ascendant conservative right adopted a staunchly pro-Austrian position in order to combat threats from both the Communist left and the radically “Germanist” Austro-Nazis on the right.Footnote ¹⁴ And how else to emphasize national distinctiveness and legitimize authoritarianism than by invoking the Habsburg legacy? It was the Nazis who unraveled this synthesis when they annexed the state in 1938 and proceeded to assail “the very concept of Austria itself,” including what Hitler reviled as the anti-German empire of the Habsburgs.Footnote ¹⁵ The horrors of World War II and the “first victim” status conferred upon Austria by the Allies (and eagerly embraced by complicit Austrians) ended all serious political impetus toward anything having to do with Germany, not to mention the fact that the German state itself was now split. Thus, the Second Republic that became independent only with the signing of the State Treaty in 1955 could, perhaps, for once fix Habsburg memory in the Austrian psyche and even give Franz Ferdinand his full due as someone who strove to protect it from the very chaos and collapse that had created the Austrian identity crisis in the first place.

If it were only so simple. Memory, by nature, is never static. Historical facts may get pushed aside and even repackaged or denied in order to support a particular political agenda, but their truth does not alter over time. “Subversive facts” is thus how the historian Timothy Garton Ash expresses the mobilization of historical truth to undermine the myths public elites use to legitimize their views.Footnote ¹⁶ Memory can also subvert. Indeed, it can be highly deceitful. Yet, there is no one “true memory” to be recovered and revived in some corrective process of collective remembrance. Through time, place, and political context, memory takes on different forms and formulations. And the memory of Franz Ferdinand is no exception, which seems all the more reason for starting with his startling death—both as a locus for examining how the archduke was regarded in his own time, and how the link between his end and that of the empire has been understood since.

The Sarajevo Assassination: “Death Knell” of the Empire

If Franz Joseph's heir had not hesitated to thumb his nose at imperial protocol by marrying below his rank, once he was dead, imperial procedure did not deny him. The emperor instructed his Lord Chamberlain to retain the strict Spanish court tradition for funerals. And since Franz Ferdinand's wife Sophie Chotek was of unequal aristocratic lineage, the humiliations she and her husband had endured in life would linger into their death. There is serious debate as to whether the rushed and “irreverent” funeral arrangements were the purposeful product of the persistent discord between the archduke and his uncle's court over the morganatic marriage, or rather the routine result of the kaiser's uncompromising commitment to Habsburg tradition. Yet, there is no doubt from the Vienna dailies that the public largely perceived the former.Footnote ¹⁷ The Austrian writer Karl Kraus was likely the first to describe the funeral as “third-class.” It was, for many, the first crass crime against the archduke's memory.Footnote ¹⁸

The indignations, however one interprets them, included highly restricted viewing hours and the small size of the chapel used for the short funeral service. The press was especially critical of the conspicuous height difference between the coffins (35cm/14in) and the fact that, while the heir's raised casket was crowned with the insignia of a Habsburg prince and military officer, his wife's was marked merely by a black fan and white gloves—taken at the time as the belittling symbols of her former status as a lady-in-waiting. Moreover, in its apparent zeal to dispatch the pair, the court kept foreign dignitaries away. The German kaiser was particularly perturbed, having just spent a splendid weekend with Franz Ferdinand's family at their Konopiště palace. “But though [Wilhelm II] had not been wanted to follow the coffins,” the editor of the Berliner Tageblatt later wrote, “he was counted upon to follow the colors.”Footnote ¹⁹

And that is the nub of it. On the very day the archduke was being given final honors and debatable dishonors in Vienna, the Foreign Ministry was preparing to send an emissary to Berlin to ensure German support should Russia intervene in the Dual Monarchy's offensive against Serbia. Franz Ferdinand's legacy was being written even as his memory was being erased. Or as Karl Kraus caustically put it: “Mixing business with pleasure, Austria celebrated the murder as grounds for war.”Footnote ²⁰

If memory begins with mourning, then the night those coffins fled their “third-class funeral” by first-class rail to Artstetten was fraught with meaning. Just as the train pulled into the station and the caskets were unloaded, a thunderstorm broke. Sundry descriptions of the scene have since come down to us. Writing during World War II, General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau described everyone running for cover while the coffins containing the late heir apparent and his wife were left behind, “alone and abandoned, in the wind and the rain.”Footnote ²¹

Karl Kraus's account takes place inside the terminal building itself, where the funeral party was sheltering from the storm (the coffins, presumably, having been brought inside):

What these scenes suggest is a sad amalgam of apathy and neglect at the moment everything was about to change, but no one had any inkling of it. Franz Ferdinand was indeed dead, yet life went on—men ate wursts and waited out the weather. The difference is when the narratives were written and, thus, what they express. Kraus's is a contemporary critique of how unworthy the scene was of the deceased—how quickly, one could say, Franz Ferdinand was being forgotten. Horstenau's later, apocalyptic portrayal goes further: to the symbolic desertion of the archduke's heritage as the empire's potential reformer.

Many others have interpreted the murder and mourning of Franz Ferdinand as omens of the empire's end. “The bullet in Sarajevo struck the Monarchy in its very heart,” wrote the Archduke's doctor, Victor Eisenmenger.Footnote ²³ In his novel Apis und Este (1931), Bruno Brehm glimpsed the dynasty's dying days in the crowd watching the nobility process with the caskets to Vienna's West Rail Station: “no one has even a vague premonition that, actually, Austria's entire aristocracy is being buried today with the Archduke.” Three decades later, the Austrian publisher Ladislaus Singer wrote: “In this ‘Third-Class Funeral’ … countless spectators caught sight of the first step towards a much larger funeral four years later: that of the entire Habsburg Empire.”Footnote ²⁴ Another powerful (and literal) metaphor for the sinking monarchy occurred as the coffins were being ferried across the Danube toward Artstetten in the dispersing storm, and a clap of thunder spooked the horses and nearly plunged the hearse into the river. An Austrian journalist who interviewed the ferryman in the 1960s wrote of “the eerie circumstances that accompanied the funeral, which also symbolically announced the end of the Monarchy.”Footnote ²⁵ And who could forget the foreboding, if fictional, thunderstorm that greeted news of the archduke's death in Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch (1932)?Footnote ²⁶

Even the immediate aftermath of the assassination could be construed cataclysmically. In his postwar reflections on the first memorial to the slain couple—the tolling of church bells in Sarajevo—the heir's former confidant, Count Ottokar Czernin, hears “the death knell of the Monarchy.” It is a melancholic sensation, even if Czernin was not actually there, the monarchy was very much alive, and the war that would end it far from foreordained, let alone lost. More than six decades later, the biographer Friedrich Weissensteiner again evoked the chiming bells as “the dirge of the Monarchy.”Footnote ²⁷

The point is not to mock these retrospective representations of the archduke's political murder. Writers regularly rely on symbolism to evoke feeling and magnify meaning. The problem lies in their unfairness to Franz Ferdinand, who may well have been the least defeatist person close to power. Moreover, by conflating his tragic death with the tremendous events that followed, they distract readers from the real reasons the war arrived. It is a comforting distraction to be certain, which is why it is as widespread today as it was in 1915, when an article in the Neue Freie Presse began: “An entire year has passed since the first shots were fired in this world war,” and then ended with Artstetten: “in this crypt lie the first victims of this war.”Footnote ²⁸ Two years later, the paper again proclaimed 28 June 1914 “the actual beginning of the world war.”Footnote ²⁹ And when its actual end came, there was this explanation: “The Sarajevo murder robbed the people of Austria-Hungary of the chance to build a more secure future, without bloodshed and enormous economic losses.”Footnote ³⁰ Here Franz Ferdinand gets his fair due, while Austrians get to feel victimized by his very assassination.

Ever since and irrespective of ideology, the language used to describe Sarajevo has regularly been that of ascribing blame for all that befell the empire. On the tenth anniversary, the Oesterreichische Wehrzeitung pronounced the political murder “a death sentence against the Monarchy” and Franz Ferdinand the “first victim” of World War I.Footnote ³¹ A decade later, page one of the Reichspost proclaimed: “Two pistol shots fired in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, not only struck down the immediate victims in mid life, but also the peace and future of Europe.”Footnote ³² In “Guilt and Fate” (Neues Wiener Tagblatt), the assassination is “the signal for an unparalleled bloodbath which meant the beginning of the end of the old Habsburg Empire, not to mention the rest of Europe and, indeed, half the world.” Accordingly, the writer wonders: “Did it have to happen?” For the archduke's former confidant Theodor von Sosnosky, the answer entailed neither assessing Vienna's motives in risking war nor its manner of fighting it, but rather how the assassination itself might have been prevented. World history and the Habsburgs, in short, all hinged on one Bosnian hitman.Footnote ³³

Even in the more stable Second Republic, the rhetorical temptation to turn the Sarajevo assassination into the coup de grâce of a once great empire has proven irresistible and passed unremarked upon. In his popular 1982 biography of Franz Ferdinand, the medical doctor Gerd Holler wrote of Princip's pistol shots piercing “not only the representatives of a tottering Empire, but the very heart of the Monarchy.” The prose is expressive, yet it expediently ignores the author's earlier assertion that news of the murder was greeted in Vienna with “shrugged shoulders”—after all, “no one wanted to let it ruin the beautiful weekend.”Footnote ³⁴

Certainly there is no shortage of non-Austrian sources that hold the assassin responsible for everything from ending Europe's golden age to deferring dialogue on women's rights.Footnote ³⁵ Yet, the case of Austria is exceptional both because Vienna held most of the cards in the looming clash and because the reference frame for reflecting on Sarajevo is the archduke's determination to reform the old empire. Thus, the assassination has slid easily into the trope of the Habsburgs' “tragic fate,” signified in such titles as Austria's Fateful Years, Austria's Fateful Days, and Austria's Fateful Places, and focused on such subjects as Mayerling and Empress Elisabeth's murder.Footnote ³⁶ “Nevertheless,” wrote von Horstenau, “it was fate's tragedy that Franz Ferdinand had to be the first to fall on the battlefield of the world war.”Footnote ³⁷ To this day, 28 June is regularly invoked as “a fateful date/day” and Sarajevo as “Europe's fate.”Footnote ³⁸

In ruling out “fate” in the empire's decision to invade Serbia, scholars cite such factors as fear of encirclement, the chance to end a long-standing regional conflict, exploiting a short-term military advantage, the increasingly aggressive nature of its German ally, and of course, worries over domestic dissolution.Footnote ³⁹ Regardless of which factor may have been foremost in 1914, historians largely concur that the monarchy's determination to take “decisive action” against Serbia was uncoerced.Footnote ⁴⁰ In opting for “a Draconian military solution,” writes the historian Samuel Williamson, “desperation, blind faith, hope, ambition and exhaustion overcame prudence, experience and caution.”Footnote ⁴¹ It is not judging from hindsight to point out that this was not the only option.

Nevertheless, the language that is typically incorporated into collective memory has tended toward the deterministic. Most commonly, this involves reducing Sarajevo to the trigger for a war that would have come anyway. During the authoritarian “Ständestaat,” schoolbooks and other sources went further, making Austrian intervention a matter of honor and full Serbian satisfaction the only acceptable outcome. Thus, these works not only stood against “the restrained and peace-loving” regime's agency, but also for the war's inevitability, as in this defensive text: “Any other solution to the conflict [with Serbia] would have been construed as weakness and merely deferred the shooting war.”Footnote ⁴²

“Honor” was certainly a relevant reason for officials who conferred with their kaiser in the Council of Ministers on 7 July 1914. In an age in which duels were regularly fought over the slightest affronts, combat between countries had greater legitimacy as an instrument of policy than it does today. The problem is that this argument justifies the war's origins in terms of official Serbia's alleged offense, leaving little space to explore the larger context for the empire's belligerence. Moreover, as scholars emphasize, it was the political murder of the regime's leading, loudest, and most consistent voice against war that produced the conflict that destroyed the dynasty, just as Franz Ferdinand had warned it would. This irony urges the question: What do we actually know about the archduke and his plans for political reform?

Franz Ferdinand as Historical Figure

For scholars of the late Habsburg monarchy, the issue of the multinational empire's viability in the modern era is central. In 1929, the sociologist Oscar Jászi framed the question as a dichotomy between the “centrifugal” forces of nationalism and the “centripetal” forces of patriotism. And for the next half century, this opposition was the basis of a supposition held by most scholars: that the traditional, centripetal institutions of bureaucracy, army, dynasty, and church were locked in a losing struggle against the spry and strengthening spirit of secular nationalism. In short, it was merely a matter of time before the empire would have tumbled.Footnote ⁴³

But by the 1980s, a “quiet revolution” in Habsburg studies was underway, as scholars began examining the cohesive forces put on such enviable display during the war years.Footnote ⁴⁴ Soon, innovative research themes like language frontiers and imperial pageantry were pointing to a political culture that was more pliable, multifaceted, and participatory than previously understood.Footnote ⁴⁵ Perhaps the empire was not “doomed” after all.

Where does Franz Ferdinand fit into this historiographical reformulation? Actually, he rarely does, as the issue is less the larger political shape of the monarchy than the local, often low-key ways in which ordinary people negotiated their national identities and dynastic affinities. Search the indices of such formative works as Staging the Past and Guardians of the Nation, and you will find but one entry for the archduke. Or as R. J. W. Evans points out in another path-breaking book: “There is no mention here of the long-time heir to the throne, but the prospect was not an encouraging one, in terms of the dynastic mission.”Footnote ⁴⁶ How, then, can we reconcile these recent findings concerning the flexibility of imperial political culture with the oft-emphasized need for state-level reform? And what factors have most affected the widely varying evaluations of the archduke's ability to implement these changes?

According to the recent and well-received biography by Alma Hannig, Franz Ferdinand was one of the most politically active and Habsburg-loyal successors in the dynasty's history. He was also, according to virtually all scholars, one of the least popular and appreciated, a distinction that is as much due to his difficult and distant personality as to his ill-defined political plans. Hannig argues adamantly against those quick to proclaim the archduke a convinced Trialist or Federalist. Like Robert Kann before her, she insists that the most we can say about his hoped-for reforms is that they would have fortified the Crown and reduced the political status of the Hungarians.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet, it is this very ambiguity concerning “what [the heir] might have meant for our future,” as the Pesti Hírlap put it in 1917, that still taints how Austrians interpret this past. After all, his first biographer tells us in his first sentence: the successor was often called a Sphinx, “because he left behind a puzzle that piqued the general public.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Compounding the obscurity of his political plans is the uncontested fact that Franz Ferdinand was “kein Grüßer,” as Karl Kraus famously wrote in an otherwise flattering obituary—that is, he had “none of those endearing qualities that put a nation of onlookers at ease with regard to their own shortcomings.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Count Czernin similarly sensed—and softly censured—“a certain grandeur in [the heir's] disdain of popularity” and distrust of the popular press.Footnote ⁵⁰ The archduke, for his part, was well aware of the reputation: “Those who know me will never believe all these things,” he allegedly said, “and the others will certainly know me one day.”Footnote ⁵¹ Because that day never came, “these things” still cling to the crown prince.

What were they and how did they manifest themselves? Why did so many outside the heir's inner circle have so little confidence in him? That Franz Ferdinand was not well liked is well known. That many truly scorned him, however, is not ignorable. His character was first formed through rivalry with his less serious younger brother, “handsome Otto,” whom his father favored and whom later the kaiser elevated during the archduke's long illness. But above all it was his battle against tuberculosis and for the aristocratically inferior Sophie Chotek that made Franz Ferdinand into the haughty, mistrustful, and impatient person contemporaries and scholars mutually remark upon.Footnote ⁵² Given up for dead in his early thirties not only by gloating Hungarians, but also competent doctors and court competitors, Franz Ferdinand fought back by fighting for his life. Ill as he was in 1895–1896, he wrote regularly and restoratively to the lady-in-waiting at the Pressburg (Bratislava) estate of the Archduchess Isabella. The story of the archduke's love for the “lowly” Countess has been told often. What is so telling about it for our purposes is the extent to which his insistence upon marrying her fits into the dominant narratives concerning who Franz Ferdinand was and, thus, how he might rule.

The morganatic match sowed a decisive split between those who despised the archduke and his faithful defenders. It led to lasting friction with Franz Joseph; required renouncing his future children's inheritance rights in a debasing ceremony before his Habsburg peers; and, most painfully for the proud crown prince, it meant the constant belittlement of his beloved. Although the kaiser twice elevated Sophie von Hohenberg (the title he gave her as a wedding gift), she could not accompany her husband at official functions. Those who looked past the punishing etiquette and treated her equally, as Wilhelm II momentously would, shimmered in the archduke's eyes and shaped, to an extent, his ideas. Otherwise, he cowered and concealed himself and his family. The “Sphinx of Belvedere” not only captures the heir's trying personality and unclear political plans, but also his frequent absence from his Belvedere Palace in Vienna, where the court's cold formality was far less appealing than his private life. “You don't know,” wrote the successor more often remembered for his “cold and distant manner,”Footnote ⁵³ “how happy I am with my family … The smartest thing I've ever done in my life has been to marry my Soph … And our children. They are my whole delight and pride.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Hence, the paradox that plagued Franz Ferdinand in life and has hounded him in the hereafter: for friends, followers, and many scholars, the fact that he survived the disease that killed his mother and surmounted the court's conventions signified a strength of character superbly suited to political power. “Notwithstanding the glaring weaknesses of his persona, he was the only one in the era of the Götterdämmerung of the monarchical idea who represented the incarnation of the ruler in his sense of mission, determination and, despite his false inferences, also in his faculties.” So wrote the respected specialist Robert Kann.Footnote ⁵⁵

Yet, for untold others, it was precisely Franz Ferdinand's headstrong, haughty, and impetuous personality that rendered him unfit for rulership. “He was a highly controversial figure,” averred Eduard Leisching, the director of Vienna's Museum for Art and Industry—“tempestuous, pugnacious, an intense hater who knew well that he had few friends …. Had he become sovereign … All that he thought he could count on would quickly have distanced itself from him, and in the struggle of everyone for himself he would have lost the throne.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Others deprecated the devoutly Catholic archduke for his clericalism and the chauvinism that he applied to Italians, Socialists, freemasons, Jews and, especially, to Hungarians. As all writers, Kann concedes that Franz Ferdinand was bigoted, not to mention “ultraconservative, autocratic, explosive, unpredictable and often vicious.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet, rather than viewing his difficult character and authoritarian inclinations in a wholly nihilistic light, Kann, and virtually all authors who have earnestly engaged with the archduke since, esteemed his “personal courage,” political intelligence and, above all, his unconditional commitment to the multinational monarchy.Footnote ⁵⁸

“Wherever there is strong light, there is sharp shadow.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Goethe's quote is cited by Victor Eisenmenger, the doctor who saw Franz Ferdinand through his battle with tuberculosis and, later, sought to correct the “spiteful rumors and scurrilous stories” propagated by his enemies. Those shadows were sharp enough, Eisenmenger feared, to eclipse any appreciation for the archduke's “keen political understanding, energy, and insight into human character … the qualities of a ruler.” The doctor was, of course, among those fulsome faithful who did not doubt that, given the chance and despite the deficiencies, Franz Ferdinand would have saved “all of Europe … from a terrible fate.” But what he also wished to commit to remembrance was something less subjective: “Basically, [the archduke] was right in the end. His Cassandra-calls fell on deaf ears and unfortunately we lived to see the fulfillment of his prophetic fear that our policy was driving us into war and ruin.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Remembering Franz Ferdinand

On 28 June 1917, in the midst of the war and not a year-and-a-half from the ruin, the first memorial to Franz Ferdinand was unveiled at the foot of Sarajevo's Latin Bridge, directly opposite the assassination site. The late secessionist structure was formidable; many South Slav nationalists would say flagrant. Dedicated in a Catholic ceremony, the monument consisted of two pillars supporting a massive bronze medallion emblazoned with the likenesses of the royal couple. A thick cornice capped the columns, culminating in stone insignia of the royal pair. The whole structure soared some twelve meters (39 feet), partially blocking the mountain views on the postcards peddled in its wake.

Those cards quickly became collector's items, after Bosnians destroyed the monument in March 1919. A steel plate set into the former Franz Joseph Street to mark where the “Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife the Duchess Sophie von Hohenberg gave their life and blood for God and Fatherland” was torn out, too.Footnote ⁶¹ How had it collapsed so quickly? What sort of memorial had Austro-Hungarian authorities actually erected?

Initiated by one Major Piffl, the monument was designed by a Hungarian, financed by the German-language Bosnian press, and dedicated by the Foreign Minister István Burián, the recently retired commander in chief Archduke Friedrich, and the province's commanding general, Stefan Sarkotić.Footnote ⁶² Austria-Hungary made no notable contribution. Indeed, there was only one report on the monument in the Austrian papers (on page 12 of the Neue Freie Presse and on page 8 in the Fremden-Blatt, a daily closely aligned with the Foreign Ministry). Even the conservative Reichspost buried the “Atonement Monument” story.Footnote ⁶³ And none of these articles had an accompanying picture, though some used the occasion to flog the rhetorical falsehood that 28 June 1914 marked “the true birthday of this global war.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Franz Ferdinand's first memorial had not been made for Austrians, as such. Rather, the regime's faithful had sought to put the heir's memory to use among the restless Bosnian peoples. And no part of the structure staged this better than a bench built into the adjacent end of the bridge, on which was carved the Roman refrain Siste viator—Stop traveler! Thus was remembrance directed to Habsburg subjects.

During the war, the main champion for Franz Ferdinand outside his inner circle was the Jesuit priest Anton Puntigam. Regularly and wrongly portrayed as the archduke's personal confessor, the pastor passed more than twenty years in Bosnia, during which he came to know Sophie von Hohenberg through his efforts to build a youth center in Sarajevo. In the aftermath of the assassination, Puntigam delivered last rites to the royal pair and helped realize the “Atonement Monument.” The priest also came to possess the murder weapon, keeping it at least until 1918, when it vanished into the Jesuits' vaults in Vienna.Footnote ⁶⁵ There it would be “discovered” in 2004. A year later, the “gun that started World War I” was featured in the exhibition “The New Austria” in Belvedere Palace, where the signing of the State Treaty had restored Austrian sovereignty a half-century earlier.Footnote ⁶⁶ No indication was given of what went on in that palace in the latter years of the “old Austria,” when the man murdered by that gun had lived and labored there for a renewed “Austria-Hungary.”Footnote ⁶⁷

From 1914 to 1918, on the cusp of the birth of the first “new Austria” after World War I, and decades before the new “new Austria” was commemorated in the 2005 exhibition, Father Puntigam had tremendous faith in the fixity of the old one. Nor was he alone, for otherwise he never would have thrown himself into an extravagant memorial project; or successfully raised funds for a “Franz Ferdinand Memorial Atonement Church” and “Sophie Chotek Youth Home”; or been awarded the Military Cross for Civil Service by Kaiser Karl, who supported Puntigam's plans. Private citizens, the Bosnian state government, and the Finance and War Ministries did, too. The State Printing Office even contributed three stamps commemorating the couple, one depicting the design of the Romanesque church and adjacent children's home. After selecting a site, the land purchase process began in August 1917—the “highpoint of [Puntigam's] life…his excitement knew no bounds.” By June 1918, “preparations were in full gear.” Four years after the assassination, a prominent and practical memorial to the victims, even if not in Austria proper, was underway.Footnote ⁶⁸

Puntigam had expressed concern that the building site might be prone to mud slides, even hiring a commission to test it. Whatever the outcome, writes his biographer, “by this time the entire Monarchy was ‘slip terrain.’” What had kept the memorial project afloat was the energy of its originator, who was as devoted to the Bosnian people as he was to the archduke's memory and his country's continuity. That is why this memorial was so meaningful, for much like the multinational empire, it was to be built by and for a broad swath of Sarajevo's multireligious citizenry. The largest donor, in fact, was a Bosnian Muslim. And Fadilbeg Fadilpašić's own children would have benefited from the Youth Home, which besides a Franz Ferdinand Museum was to include a playground, library, theatre, and lecture halls, the programs of which would be interconfessional. Certainly, there was opposition to Puntigam's plans, as enough hungry Bosnians could not swallow the necessity for such a costly complex. But in the end, the only thing strong enough to destroy the project was the war itself, which did so by bringing down the monarchy.Footnote ⁶⁹

That today virtually nothing is known in Austria of this memorial undertaking is a somber précis of the archduke's legacy. Once the war and regime were lost, his memory was bound more to the afterlife of the assassination than to the actual life of the successor. Surely the massive economic deprivations and political instability in interwar Austria ensured that ordinary citizens had more important imperatives than funding an immense memorial to a Habsburg prince who never reached power. Yet, that does not explain why, despite dozens of articles on the archduke in the interwar era, I have not found one on Puntigam's project or even whether any memorial for Franz Ferdinand was warranted.Footnote ⁷⁰ And there was virtually nothing in the Austrian press about the destruction of the monument that did get built on the assassination site. The “new Austrians,” though not yet validated by the Saint-Germain Treaty, were, evidently, already eager to get on.

This distancing entailed implicit avoidance of Franz Ferdinand's memory. Whereas the wartime kaisers had decreed memorial masses and military obsequies for the archduke and duchess on 28 June, such events now became private affairs. According to one source, “thousands of pilgrims” braved the poor postwar roads and railways to Artstetten each year to pay their respects and, perhaps, appease their idealized pinings for the recent but unreachable past.Footnote ⁷¹ In 1924, hundreds of aristocratic acquaintances were welcomed at Artstetten by the Hohenberg children. Nearly three years after the lately deceased Emperor Karl's last attempt to retake the throne, they swore an oath of Habsburg allegiance upon the sarcophagi.Footnote ⁷²

These annual excursions may well have attracted fair numbers of Austrians. And there can be no question of their earnestness, as there was no compulsion to undertake them or to report on them. A short piece in the Neue Freie Presse for the tenth anniversary obsequies is all I found with regard to anything one could call a “pilgrimage” to Artstetten.Footnote ⁷³ And if ever there was a “Society of Franz Ferdinand,” or some such association, then no reference has emerged in my research. The late archduke undoubtedly had a following, yet nothing like the “hero-cult” Yugoslavists built around his assassin.Footnote ⁷⁴ Moreover, the Habsburg-inhospitable politics of the First Republic did more for forgetfulness and ambivalence than remembrance and reverence. If Emperor Karl decreed Artstetten a memorial site and saved its church bells from being melted into ammunition, in interwar Austria the funds needed to enlarge the crypt and construct more permanent coffins came from private coffers.Footnote ⁷⁵ So it went, too, with the official obsequies in the monarchy's military garrisons and Vienna's Votive Church—short-lived traditions that, the silent and sporadic sources suggest, died out the instant the dynasty did.Footnote ⁷⁶

Nor did the Austrian government try to resurrect the mutilated Sarajevo monument inside its own borders or even establish any memorial to the successor killed in the line of duty. To this day, there has never been a public monument to the archduke anywhere outside of Artstetten, not to mention a street or square named for him. In 1935, a Franz Ferdinand Girls' School was established in his birth house, the Khuenburg Palace in Graz. But the Nazis removed the name, and it was never restored to the building. Likewise, the “Franz Ferdinand caserne” in Vienna was renamed for the Starhemberg family in 1967. A marble plaque from the k.u.k. Uhlan regiment in Vienna's Karlskirche and a stained glass window above the altar in the basilica Maria Taferl (near Artstetten) tell us that the archduke has not been forgotten by all his peoples—namely, those in the church and armed forces. Once tracked down, however, they tell us little more about the successor than the two eateries that today carry his name (in Perchtoldsdorf and St. Florian in Steyr).

Just like the monarchy he had lived to rehabilitate, Franz Ferdinand would fade quickly from public memory, as the new Austrian state sought to establish its own national identity by disestablishing its imperial one. By no means did this denote the all-out dismissal of all that was Habsburg. The war had been too colossal a calamity to be constructed as some sort of heaven-sent catalyst for the kind of diminutive, independent Austria no one had wanted in the first place.Footnote ⁷⁷ Moreover, the suddenness of the empire's disappearance gave way to the kind of confusion that often takes refuge in nostalgia, as what one scholar labeled “Old Austrians” looked back longingly on “the loss of greatness, harmony, and stability, the end of an idyllic world.”Footnote ⁷⁸ For many, 28 June 1914, rather than the war's end, came to be reviled as the day when, wrote Stefan Zweig, “in a single second” this dependable world was “smashed into a thousand pieces like a hollow clay vessel.”Footnote ⁷⁹ His fellow Austrian writer Joseph Roth also aimed his anguish at the assassination: “The world is wrecked. And Sarajevo stands. It should not be a city. It should be a monument, to make everyone remember with horror.”Footnote ⁸⁰

In the wrecked, interwar world in which Austrians found themselves, Franz Ferdinand figured like a passing fad. His steadfast followers—Eisenmenger, Sosnosky, Reichspost editor Friedrich Funder, journalist Leopold von Chlumecky, and others in his “Belvedere Circle”—kept the memory alive with writings that elevated and elucidated the heir, or at least corrected the myths and maligning. “Franz Ferdinand, as he really was,” was thus the title of an article in the Neues Wiener Journal, in which a director at the State Archives strove to staunch such “misinformation” as that the archduke had been plotting to establish Slavic kingdoms for his sons.Footnote ⁸¹ Others stressed the Successor's irrepressible energies and unconditional affection for family and fatherland.Footnote ⁸² The first two biographies of Franz Ferdinand, both published in 1929, convincingly situated him as a confident and serious statesman.Footnote ⁸³

If time did not favor the would-be reformer of what interwar Austrian elites were increasingly constructing as a doomed empire, timing all but annihilated him. Newspaper articles regularly appeared on the anniversary of the archduke's death rather than his birth on 18 December. For what would have been his sixtieth birthday and the start of his seventh year as sovereign, there was nothing on the heir in any major Austrian paper.Footnote ⁸⁴ Outside his inner circle, silence reigned even over revisionism. Yet, there were crucial exceptions, many of them literary, that did much to shape the long-term and largely negative image of Franz Ferdinand.

One of the earliest and most important was Bruno Brehm's novel Apis und Este. Before becoming a committed National Socialist and Vienna city councilman, this k.u.k. officer's son who had studied art and ancient history penned an international bestseller endorsed by Robert Kann,Footnote ⁸⁵ prefaced by the Harvard historian Sidney Fay, and printed in multiple languages and editions.Footnote ⁸⁶ The first of a trilogy on the empire's collapse, Brehm's celebrated work is also an outright character assassination of the assassinated archduke.

From Franz Ferdinand's first appearance at a pageant for the emperor in 1903, his reputation is ruined: “No one really knows him … Everyone is afraid of him; it is as though he personified the dangerous clouds which are now threatening the Empire.” Like many antagonists, Brehm dwells on his protagonist's compulsive hunting. In one scene, Franz Ferdinand forces a peasant to drive into a ditch so that his hunting party can pass, and then makes the man's son into a beater who died in service of the archduke's obsession, yet for whose funeral the heir refused to contribute a single cent. In another story, a child brought up to fear the “evil Este” bursts into tears upon meeting the real crown prince of Konopiště. Brehm's Franz Ferdinand may believe in his “duty” to the state and capacity, “with God's help,” to save his country, but gratuitous scenes such as when he publicly insults a Dragoon (i.e., a professional defender of that country) do little to persuade readers of his prospects.Footnote ⁸⁷

Yet, herein lies the novel's revealing tension, which is the tension inside its author as well. Whereas a few of Franz Ferdinand's followers found a way to align the heir's nonracial thinking with their ripening Nazi leanings, Brehm's depiction is truer to the archduke's multinational ideals.Footnote ⁸⁸ What the writer got right (just not for the right reasons) was that the authoritarian successor was no Nazi; indeed, he would have despised the Fascists as much as he did the Pan-Germanists of his own day. Yet, in pointing up the real Franz Ferdinand—Habsburg imperialist, devout Catholic and, as the assassination's Serbian abettor Apis puts it: “the only man over there who still believes in his rotten crumbling country”—Brehm held little back in his belittlement of the insufficiently völkisch archduke, a man so vain he dances before a mirror miming: “Am I not a fine figure of a man? ... King of the Alps and Enemy of Mankind?”Footnote ⁸⁹ In short, Franz Ferdinand's mission to rescue the monarchy is easily mocked, though not necessarily minimized. After all, before Brehm himself had sipped the völkisch Kool-Aid, he, too, had been emotionally devastated by the empire's downfall.

That may explain why the author failed to find anything redeeming in the archduke's death. In fact, the novel evinces some sympathy toward the fallen, future emperor in its critique of the disrespectful funeral arrangements. The thunderstorm at the train station near Artstetten, for example, is rendered as God's way of “providing the salute of honor, which men have refused the dead.” Brehm also has several officers defend the archduke for defending the army, “whenever some silly fool in the Government dares attack us.”Footnote ⁹⁰ If the author's Franz Ferdinand were merely some unfeeling slayer of animals driven along by his grasping wife,Footnote ⁹¹ then how is it that he also gets this obituary from his adversary?

Brehm by no means makes Franz Ferdinand look good, let alone like the heroic potential savior of the Habsburg state. But neither does his novel make the monarchy and the archduke's attachment to it look foolish, or fanciful.Footnote ⁹³

If Apis und Este teetered between respecting the imperial past and resenting the man of its future, Roth and Zweig came right to the point. In Radetzkymarsch (1932), Joseph Roth only evokes the heir toward the end of his novel, when the assassination is announced to a rollicking and rather drunken group of officers at a summer party. Yet, the effect on this multinational microcosm of the monarchy is immediate, as the Hungarians can neither contain their pleasure nor curb their ethnic pride. “The son of a bitch is dead!” shouts Count Benkyö in his native language rather than the army's official German. It is one of this classic work's most memorable lines, along with a Hungarian compatriot's gleeful insistence that “If the Successor has really been murdered, then there are other Successors!”Footnote ⁹⁴

Stefan Zweig expressed much the same sentiment, though not through fiction. In his wistful memoir Die Welt von Gestern (1942), he has so little sympathy for the deceased archduke “with the bulldog neck and stone cold eyes” that he projects this perspective upon his countrymen in a work written wholly from memory decades after Sarajevo. Zweig thus assures us that most Austrians were too little stirred by the news of the assassination to let it ruin their summer weekend. Quite a few, in fact, “secretly sighed with relief” at the prospect of “the much more beloved young Archduke Karl” becoming kaiser. After all, Zweig writes as if it were self-evident, the humorless, unfriendly successor and his equally insufferable wife “lacked everything that counts for real popularity in Austria: amiability, personal charm and easygoingness.” Austria's then most-famous writer goes on to deride the archduke's “icy air,” tin ear, and utter tactlessness. When read together with Roth's bestseller, it is hard to imagine two more devastating, formative influences for Franz Ferdinand's memory.Footnote ⁹⁵

Unless, that is, Ludwig Winder's Jewish heritage had not prevented the Prague writer from publishing his acclaimed novel Der Thronfolger (1937) in interwar Germany or Austria. First printed in Zürich and later (1984, 1989) in the DDR, the work only recently became well known to the Austrian public, thanks to a new 2014 edition reviewed widely and glowingly in the German language press.Footnote ⁹⁶ Nevertheless, and like his contemporary literati, Winder offered an unsparing portrait of the crown prince—the main difference this time being that the novel delved directly into its subject's psychological sufferings.

Winder first returns us to the protagonist's childhood rivalry with his brother Otto, imagining how this awakened feelings of rage, reclusiveness, and self-reproach: “I know it well,” the youthful archduke thinks to himself. “The world is so mean, so base. In order to be happy, one has to be as brash, bold, and barefaced as [Otto] is.” Over the course of the novel, Franz Ferdinand relearns this lesson and reaffirms his aloofness. In the army, he wonders: “Why do people find me so repulsive? ... Why is any low-born, middle-class officer … happier than I am? … Why is there this dreadful wall between me and the world?” And later, when his political confidant Max Wladimir von Beck agrees to become the kaiser's prime minister, the successor is beside himself with a sense of betrayal: “Because if Beck were a traitor, where was there a man who was not a traitor? … How right I always was not to depend on anybody!”Footnote ⁹⁷

Thus shaped and chagrined by this all-consuming mistrust and Frankenstein-like longing for love, the archduke reacts to every setback with suspicion, lashing out at the world and drawing in on himself. Soon his alienation morphs into megalomania; he begins to begrudge his powerlessness, bewail his wasted potential. During the struggle over marrying Sophie, Franz Ferdinand imagines: “Now it must be my turn. Now I could show what's inside of me.” And elsewhere in the work he assures himself, if not the readers, of his capacity “to renew the old Reich … [and] redress all that his uncle has debased and depraved.” Winder even handles the heir's obsessive hunting as a psychological surrogate for his irrepressible sense of unfulfilled promise: “He did not know what reveries burned, raged, railed, and wrangled inside of him. … Only with a hunting rifle in hand … did he perceive the splendor of life itself.” Self-pitying, wildly restless, and with an abiding sense that everyone was out to get him, Winder's successor is by no means a man who could hold together a monarchy, let alone himself. The fact that the renunciation oath also occurred on a June 28 (1900) hence becomes, for the author, a portent of historical providence rather than a mere coincidence.Footnote ⁹⁸

As a literary contemplation of the archduke's inner turmoil, Winder's novel may work on some level. Even Robert Kann commended its “truly artistic value” and historical accuracy.Footnote ⁹⁹ Yet, this time the historian overlooked a key factor for any fair reflection on Franz Ferdinand: his strong and consistent caution when it came to military conflict.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ During the 1908–1909 Bosnian Crisis, the archduke had not only opposed war with Serbia; he had initially stood against annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina altogether. Yet, Winder's worryingly impatient protagonist comes off almost as belligerent as his chief of staff and the empire's outspoken proponent of preventive war, General Conrad von Hötzendorf:

The archduke-as-warmonger myth did not originate with Winder—it was already widespread before the war and boosted after by books like the journalist Heinrich Kanner's popular and, for Franz Ferdinand, punishing Kaiserliche Katastrophenpolitik (1922).Footnote ¹⁰² But it gained much credence from Winder's depiction of an heir who views violence as a cathartic escape from a life squandered in the seemingly endless expectation of power. Franz Ferdinand desperately wants to restore the empire's preeminence, and Winder reviews his fluctuating plans to do so. Yet, the novel presents this ambition as private and pathological—less a higher cause or calling than a symptom of the archduke's insurmountable insecurities.

If neither of these novels lifted the image of Franz Ferdinand, the authoritarian “Ständestaat” did try to clamp down on the calumnies. Winder's work was banned, and censors buried all but the most positive portrayals of the archduke and Habsburg regime generally.Footnote ¹⁰³ At a time when sympathy for the monarchy and cultivation of Austrian identity went so far as to repeal the Habsburg Law of 3 April 1919 and dress the army in outdated imperial uniforms, it is not surprising to find a profusion of praise for Franz Ferdinand on the twentieth anniversary of his assassination.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ A front-page piece in the Neue Freie Presse described the purposeful, noble, and “most charming” archduke, a man who not only wanted the best for the people, but who understood what that was: “Economic cooperation with political independence!”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Similarly, a cover story in the Reichspost asserted that “had Franz Ferdinand ascended the throne, a powerful personality for maintaining peace in Europe would have strode to the fore of international politics.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Although many textbooks stated that some incident would sooner or later have slid the scales to war, this did not mean that such an outcome was honorable. The Austro-Fascist state straddled a thin line between the Third Reich and its founding commitment to forging an independent Austrian identity—warding off war, it follows, was also a priority.

In this respect, a perfect occasion came soon after the May 1934 Constitution installed one-party rule in Austria. 9 September marked the start of three days of dedication festivities for a national memorial to k.u.k. soldiers who fell in the world war. The official site of the ceremonies was the Burgtor (Castle Gate), at the southwest entrance to the Heldenplatz (Heroes' Square). Completed in 1824 to commemorate the victory over Napoleon, this neo-classical structure was transformed into a war memorial under the First Republic.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Yet, by the time of its lavishly nationalistic inauguration, Austria's democracy had met its demise and the “Ständestaat” appropriated the memorial as the “Austrian Heroes' Monument.” The opening thus took on new meaning as a consciously orchestrated act of Austrian self-representation.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In a pageant that pointed up the nation's long-standing ties to the Catholic Church and Habsburg family, political leaders consecrated a tomb to the unknown soldier meant to represent neither the old nor the new Austria, “but rather the eternal Austria, the idea of Austria, which is the idea of the conciliation of peoples and peace between classes.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

That was the language of Das Kleine Blatt and much the rest of the unfree press. Officially and insistently, this was “no Western-style ‘Unknown Soldier.’ It was a memorial for old Austria's heroic sons from 1618 to 1918!”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Historical continuity mattered for Ständestaat leaders, as it often does with authoritarian regimes. That attitude assured Franz Ferdinand a prominent place in the new memorial, even if he neither fought nor fell in the war. Just to the left of the concave wall facing the anonymous tomb, in large block letters, one reads: “Archduke Franz Ferdinand; Assassinated in Sarajevo; 28 June 1914.” This was not the first time the heir's peacetime political murder was equated with the fallen of World War I. As of 1934, however, this mode of remembrance was woven into official discourse.

The 1938 Anschluss that promptly put paid to the Austrian identity crisis did not so much burnish the negative image of Franz Ferdinand as render it irrelevant, since the Third Reich was anti-Austria-Hungary to begin with. The archduke's death was deemed a liberating Stunde der Bewährung (moment of truth) rather than the fateful tragedy of Austrian interpretation.Footnote ¹¹¹ Articles marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination conceived it less as the trigger for a tragic world war than for the decisive “Thirty Years' War” to regenerate all Germans and initiate “a new and better age.” And from this “undivided war,”Footnote ¹¹² the archduke's missed opportunity to reform the multinational monarchy—“the most guilt-ridden dynasty the German people ever had to endure,” in Adolf Hitler's own wordsFootnote ¹¹³ —was not an effort ever worth undertaking. As the führer further put it:

Complicating the official Nazi view, however, was Hitler's attachment to his native Austria, expressed as “intense love for my German-Austrian homeland; profound hatred for the Austrian state.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Any polity that interfered with unifying and amplifying the Volk—be it the empire or interwar Austria—was anathema to a man whose worldview revolved around the pseudo-science of “race” and whose arch-enterprise was to weaken or wipe out the non-German ones. Hence, Thomas Grischany's point that Hitler's relationship to Austria “cannot be reduced to a sweeping hatred” is well taken, for as long as the Austro-German “master race” reigned supreme, even the monarchy had some merit. The question for Third Reich historians was: What sort of ruler might Franz Ferdinand have been when one weighs his unwavering German-Austrian identity against his hopes to stabilize the multinational state?Footnote ¹¹⁶

Even academics in the Third Reich presented a relatively nuanced portrait of the crown prince, at least to the extent the censors assented. With the successor's murder, wrote one, “a final great hope was snatched from the Danube Monarchy.” He then proceeded to flatter the führer for bringing the Volk (that is, the ethnic Germans of Austria-Hungary) back to its true, Germanic fold.Footnote ¹¹⁷ No love lost here, though no disrespect for the heir either. Konrad Klaser, a bigoted “specialist” in Balkan conspiracies, also admitted that “hardly any other member of the privileged classes comprehended the Monarchy's weaknesses … [and] appreciated the strengths of the German administrative apparatus” so well as Franz Ferdinand. This was profound praise from an ideologue who otherwise argued that the archduke fully misread the times, which pointed away from the Church and toward the “völkisch self-consciousness” of the Austrian Pan-Germans.Footnote ¹¹⁸

A nice illustration of this ambiguity appears in a biography published in this period by Georg Franz-Willing. Although the author's later books on National Socialism and the origins of World War II have been both recognized for their interpretative technique and rebuked as “appallingly tendentious,” his study of Franz Ferdinand is more useful than one would expect from 1943 Germany. Relying on writings by such reliable witnesses as Czernin, Chlumecky, and Sosnosky, as well as non-Austrians like the British historian R. W. Seton-Watson, Franz-Willing ventures no new interpretation. Yet, he is so thorough in his summary of the literature that he validates those authors who went out of their way to combat the stereotypes, color the generalizations, and convey the crown prince in a constructive and nonideological light. Thus, while the author acknowledges that the archduke was a “fervent Catholic,” he also insists Franz Ferdinand never would have allowed his religious passions to conflict with his political plans. The same goes for Franz-Willing's respect for the successor's well-attested personal assets—“intelligence and willpower, quick learning, [an] excellent memory, clear judgment and, let's not forget, good insight into human nature.” Only then does he bring in the better-known “blemishes,” like the heir's “huge capacity for hatred,” “craving for recognition,” and “misanthropy.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Franz-Willing's study, as the interwar works it drew upon, did not unleash a new trend of remembrance for Franz Ferdinand. The Nazis built no more memorials to the man than had interwar Austrians, which is to say none. Nevertheless, the archduke's paradoxical life and premature death fool all expectations as to his legacy for the Nazis, and point, yet again, to its yawning divergence from his memory. As a legitimist and multinationalist hated by Hitler, Franz Ferdinand should not have fared well under the Nazis.Footnote ¹²⁰ And yet, I only found one textbook that was explicitly callous toward the successor, whereas the empire itself is regularly ridiculed for its “half-measures” and sluggishness, especially in the wake of the assassination.Footnote ¹²¹

Austria-Hungary may not have been worth saving for “Aryan civilization,” but as in Brehm's novel—awarded Nazi Germany's National Book and Film Prize in 1939—neither were Franz Ferdinand's imperial pretensions not worth respecting.Footnote ¹²² After all, the Third Reich was also an empire, and some of its staunchest Austrian adherents had, in another era, belonged to the archduke's inner circle.Footnote ¹²³ Hitler himself tipped his hat to the Habsburgs when, on 15 March 1938, he announced the Anschluss from the Vienna Hofburg. Moreover, if Franz Ferdinand failed as a völkisch hero, his murderers fared far worse. Klaser's work is so anti-Serb that in it even the prime minister taught Bosnians to throw bombs!Footnote ¹²⁴ And in numerous textbooks and the Nazis's official mouthpiece Völkischer Beobachter, Gavrilo Princip is portrayed as a Jew and freemason both.Footnote ¹²⁵ That Franz Ferdinand often came off better than Nazi purists presented him, while his rabidly nationalist, anti-Habsburg assassins appeared worse, is an ironic tribute from an ethnonational state. It is a tribute nonetheless.

The Third Reich, like all ideological systems, was conveniently inconsistent. The Second Austrian Republic that emerged from its ruins thus did so forcefully, aided by the “first victim” status bestowed by the Allies and aiming to carve out a path in which “every historical continuity was a nuisance … now history was not merely Austrified (austrifiziert), but even more: It was virtually ‘little Austrified’ (verkleinösterreichert).”Footnote ¹²⁶ In other words, all imperial aspirations were off, including Anschluss. The new “new Austria” was determined to go it alone as a small republic.

What this meant in terms of confronting the imperial past depended, of course, on who was in power and how secure citizens felt. Although it is harder to periodize the postwar era than the interwar one in terms of the “Habsburg Myth,” historian Laurence Cole's essay of that title does identify three key “phases.” After 1945, the conservative Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) instrumentalized Habsburg history in its nation-building practices. This was the era that brought the sappy yet successful Sisi films (1955–1957) romanticizing the life of Empress Elisabeth and creating a lasting icon for Austrian identity. It also gave rise to an array of published works, memorial ceremonies, and cultural events exalting assorted Habsburgs and exhibiting a “good old days” image of the empire.Footnote ¹²⁷

This period of purposeful Habsburg revival petered out around 1970, with the ascent of the Austrian Socialist Party (SPÖ). For the next dozen or so years, the nation-building project promoted contemporary cultural figures over traditional Habsburg ones. Certainly, the public's nostalgic impulse for imperial kitsch never completely cooled, and the myth's “recovery” that Cole dates to around 1983 was a seamless one. Starting with a historical reconstruction of Maria Theresa for the 200th anniversary of her death, this period saw two exhibitions on Kaiser Franz Joseph (1984, 1987); the celebrated return and subsequent burial (in the Kaiser Crypt) of ex-Empress Zita (1982, 1989); and a booming “museumification” that included the 1982 opening of the Franz Ferdinand Museum in Artstetten.Footnote ¹²⁸

By the late 1980s, the Habsburg myth was well on its way to staking a permanent place in Austrian self-perception. Fueled by a fanciful craving for the security and sparkle of the imperial age, once Communism collapsed in 1989, the myth also embraced “a kind of ‘neo-Habsburg vision’” in which modern Austria would be the political and economic engine for a “renewed ‘Mitteleuropa.’” Cole knows that not all Austrians appreciated the “Habsburgiana” spectacle, especially when it constrained confronting less savory parts of their recent past. That is why during the Waldheim affair in 1986, it was all too easy to take refuge in an idealized imperial identity while repressing the reality of Austrian complicity in Nazi crimes. But all myths have their comeuppances, and how Franz Ferdinand would fit into this one is, if not the last chapter on his memory, certainly the one that appears most lasting.Footnote ¹²⁹

In a piece published in Neues Österreich for the fiftieth anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination, the historian Gerald Stourzh concluded: “Hence the heir apparent has become the symbol for a renewal of the multinational state.”Footnote ¹³⁰ It is a fine phrase from a formidable scholar, though the article focuses more on the archduke's murder than his ideas for reform. Moreover, it is more than debatable as to how well this statement holds up, even under the democratic Second Republic and in the midst of the Habsburg revival.

After all, no memorials for the “would-be renewer” had materialized, nor streets named. And the assassination's fortieth anniversary largely failed to fix attention on the archduke's political aspirations. As in the interwar era, the Austrian press produced plentiful articles on “the fateful day in Sarajevo” that “wrecked an entire world order” and ruined the unity and freedom of Europe just as it stood “at the very pinnacle of [global] progress.”Footnote ¹³¹ In short, what Franz Ferdinand had hoped to do was still being displaced by what his assassin allegedly did, thus forcing the unfortunate “peace Kaiser” to “take up the sword.” Alas, this piece waxed predictably, “what had to come, came.” And it ends by rehashing the “fateful paradox” that linked “the Reich's presumptive reformer” to the regime's regrettable departure.Footnote ¹³²

Equally paradoxical is that the author overlooked a study of Franz Ferdinand published a year earlier by Rudolf Kiszling, a former k.u.k. officer who had gained access to the archduke's papers as director of the war archives. The work that resulted praised the heir's political skills so highly that some accused Kiszling of hagiography. Yet, this biographer was no Eisenmenger or Sosnosky, and what he wrote about the successor's character and capacities deserved more attention in the public sphere in 1954 than the normative nostalgia that foretold the empire's implosion and forgave Franz Joseph for having little recourse but to war.Footnote ¹³³

A year later, when the Second Republic came into existence and the first Sisi film came out, the moment seemed auspicious for a dramatization of the incident which, allegedly, led to the First Austrian Republic. That is, at least, what the director Fritz Kortner calculated with Sarajevo—Um Thron und Liebe (1955).Footnote ¹³⁴ The problem for Austrian filmgoers, however, is that Kortner was more attuned to the assassins than their prey. Franz Ferdinand is far less the work's focus than questioning the righteousness of imperial rule and the legitimacy of murder as a means of rebellion. In one implausible scene, a sympathetic Sophie Chotek directly argues the issue with three of the arrested conspirators.

As for her husband, he comes off as a diligent, if headstrong and heedless soldier with a profound chip on his shoulder. We see this plainly when Franz Ferdinand resists warnings to call off the Sarajevo visit; and painfully each time he envyingly eyes his uncle's bust in the hotel room. His willful character is also evident in the archduke's habitual smoking, which Sophie repeatedly tries to stop until his temper flares in the film's finale—as they leave City Hall, she lovingly hands him a (final) cigarette. The resigned gesture foreshadows the murder, because Franz Ferdinand, whose politics barely appear in the film, seems such an obstinate and impetuous person that he could never be destined for any greatness anyway.

Um Thron und Liebe does venture a “viewpoint,” though it has little to do with the title and is unoriginal in the extreme. “Fate is fate,” says one inebriated chauffeur to the other as they await the couple outside City Hall. This message, as we have seen, has dominated Austrian discourse on the archduke ever since Brehm, Czernin, and others sought to insert significance into a single assassination with sensational consequences. Although certainly a superior artist, Kortner was no better equipped to transcend the triteness and untruthfulness of “destiny” than the interwar interlocutors. Even in the film's final scene, as black flags unfurl from the town hall's tall windows, it is as if they had always been there, just waiting to mourn the monarchy.

If Austrian memory of the archduke received any reprieve prior to Professor Stourzh's improbable pronouncement on his symbolic stature as political reformer, then it came only in a few minor historical novels. Eduard Danszky's Krone und Herz (1952/53) sets up a sublime analogy between the successor's desire for marriage and family, and the larger “family of nations” he envisions for a federalized Empire. In the battle he wages to wed Sophie against the “thuggish [court] ceremony,” Franz Ferdinand comes to realize that it is precisely this Habsburg conformity and formality that weaken the human bonds so essential to sustaining the state. When his beloved expires beside him, then so too must the archduke's dream of a rejuvenated monarchy.Footnote ¹³⁵

Like Danszky, E. J. Görlich published his novel with a Christian press and stressed the faith of its principal characters. Yet, he also found much that was worldly about his subject. In Der Thronfolger (1961), a colorful cast of ordinary Austrians—a Viennese waiter who expounds on the meaning of authority; a police inspector whose patience is tried by a young Adolf Hitler—gradually grasp just how much the archduke means to them as the monarchy's reformer-in-chief. Görlich never idealizes Franz Ferdinand, who is stiff, irritable, and self-righteous. Sophie, too, is stereotypically depicted as ambitious and pretentious. Nevertheless, this successor is capable and clever, and the novel traces a growing public perception of him as the last and best hope for transforming the empire into a truly equal “union of peoples.”Footnote ¹³⁶

In this respect, Der Thronfolger has the most indicative dénouement of all the Franz Ferdinand novels. It unfolds in Vienna's South Rail Station, which the author's (fictional?) grandfather had policed when Crown Prince Rudolf's remains arrived there after his suicide. A quarter-century later, the work terminates at the same terminus, as the nine-year old author waits with his grandfather for the arrival of the murdered couple. “Look at the two coffins,” the retired civil servant implores the child. “In them lies the hope of Austria.” It's an ideal shared by the waiter and police inspector alike, though by the novel's end both are resigned to an interminable interval until their prince comes to power. As for the officer, this leads to his symbolic release of an unrepentant Hitler. After all, one cannot be forbearing forever.Footnote ¹³⁷

Neither of these novels has been translated or reprinted, nor achieved nearly the impact of Winder's Der Thronfolger and Apis und Este, the latter of which was reissued four times during the Habsburg revival. Certainly, the back-to-back 100th birthday of the archduke in December 1963 and the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination six months later kept Franz Ferdinand in the public eye. Yet, the focus stayed on the assassins rather than the plans and passions of their victim. Indeed, the only “Portrait of the Murdered” piece I came across was by the successor's grandson, Georg Hohenberg. And his first sentence says it all: “In the twenty years I spent in primary school, middle school, and university, my Grandfather has been summoned from the lectern in so many different ways that a member of my generation could not possibly form a clear picture of him, and I myself sometimes become confused when I think about him.” What Hohenberg did comprehend, however, was that there was much more to the Archduke than “The Man at the Turning Point of the World,” and yet it was equally unhelpful to idealize him as the ill-starred savior of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.Footnote ¹³⁸

Part of the problem with confronting Franz Ferdinand in 1964 was that most Austrians had not meaningfully confronted the empire's role in the outbreak of war in 1914. That summer, there was more discussion of the issue in the Swiss than in the Austrian press.Footnote ¹³⁹ Since Fritz Fischer's groundbreaking 1961 work on German responsibility, moreover, Austria had been off the hook and out of the public eye.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Additionally, the appearance, in 1975, of the Austrian Friedrich Würthle's study of the links between the assassination and Serbian administration relieved pressure to readdress the war's origins, let alone the heir's politics.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The publication of Eduard Leisching's damning memoir three years later did not lend itself to revisiting 1914 either. Austrians had bigger historical fish to fry in terms of facing their less equivocal culpability as part of yet another empire—the Nazi one.

It is unclear whether there was any relationship between Austria's late encounter with its Nazi past and the fact that Franz Ferdinand's arrival in the “Habsburg revival” came so late as well. Yet, it was at about the same time, in the early 1980s, that we observe a surge in attention to the archduke in ways both more positive and pervasive than previously. One need only compare the scant and stale interest in the assassination's sixtieth anniversary to the articles and events on the seventieth, including an exhaustive exhibition on Franz Ferdinand's life in the very place it began—the Graz City Museum, housed since 1972 in the Khuenburg Palace. What made this exhibition truly exceptional was that it treated the successor as a “historically significant personality” not because of how he died, but because of what he had done. A decade later, the museum put on a repeat performance. And even though the building was never renamed for the heir, a plaque on its facade now memorializes his birth there.Footnote ¹⁴²

With an academic assist from Robert Kann's groundbreaking Franz Ferdinand Studien (1976), which drew on its subject's private papers, the successor's presence in Austria has progressively risen. In addition to the opening of the Artstetten museum in 1982 and the wealth of press in 1984, four popular biographies (in German) appeared that decade.Footnote ¹⁴³ Europas verlorene Hoffnung (Europe's Lost Hope) was the alluring if misleading title of one, which cautiously argued that the archduke's death at least kept him from having to suffer full-on defeat in his reform effort. Yet, as in the other new works, Max Polatschek was sympathetic to his subject, presenting him in an appreciably more subtle light than the hagiographies or harangues from earlier in the century. In fact, the most successful of these new studies, Weissensteiner's Der verhinderte Herrscher, tried so hard to get inside Franz Ferdinand's head that a later edition (2007) added a “psychological profile.”

In subsequent decades, popular works probed the heir's softer and more secluded side. The Habsburgs' Greatest Love Story (2001) and Forbidden Love in the Imperial Court (2004) were catchy titles that suffered from the kind of kitschiness one would expect from books more partial to imperial courting than the court itself.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ But that does not make their stories less truthful, or beautiful, especially considering Franz Ferdinand's professional unfulfillment. In recognition of the reliable appeal of royal intimacy, Artstetten mounted the exhibit Throne or Love for the couple's ninetieth anniversary in 1990.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Franz Ferdinand may mostly be remembered for the murder that made him miss out on the former, but as Robert Müller reminds us: “His strength was his marriage. His feat his Frau. He himself both. His genius his experience.” Today the museum's permanent exhibition is entitled “For Heart and Crown” (Für Krone und Herz).Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Judging from the sheer number of news articles, a model matrimony may be one thing Austrians actually know about Franz Ferdinand, besides the fact of his death and his hunting fanaticism. Indeed, that is what the former director of Austria's Military History Museum, Manfried Rauchensteiner, told me and my anecdotal inquiries bear out.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Certainly, for those interested, there have been more ways to access the archduke since the 1980s. In addition to the aforementioned works, the archivist Wladimir Aichelburg has been a veritable one-man industry on the heir's behalf, publishing articles to complement the Artstetten exhibits; three volumes of annotated Notizen zu einem ungewöhnlichen Tagebuch eines außergewöhnlichen Lebens (Notes on an Unusual Journal of an Exceptional Life, 2014); and booklets on such themes as “the Successor and the sea” and “Franz Ferdinand as building contractor.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ As for the latter, rising interest in the heir's other obsessions (besides Sophie and venery)—nature, monument, and urban preservation—has spawned the sweeping study Thronfolger Franz Ferdinand als Denkmalpfleger; focused research on his preservationist interventions in Salzburg and Istria; and even speculation on the successor's “green” credentials. Absurd and presentist as this last may seem, the archduke's many activities in the cultural/artistic realm (including efforts to create an ancestral portrait gallery, or Ahnensaal, in Vienna's Neue Burg) have, like his political pursuits, been wholly overshadowed not only by Sarajevo but also, writes one author without irony, his “giganto-manic hunting passion.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

That Austrian exposure to the archduke has become more variegated is unquestionable. “He was a ‘Renaissance man,’” one book review began in 1994, an unthinkable assertion two decades earlier.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In 1999, the Austrian Mint mounted “Franz Ferdinand: ‘The End of an Era,’” an exhibition that examined the fullness of its subject's life even as it gave the usual, inordinate attention to his death.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In 2010, another exhibit went exploring nineteenth-century India with the archduke in Vienna's Weltmuseum. As a young man, the successor known for dying in Sarajevo had done something no Habsburg of his standing had before: traveled the world “to learn about foreign peoples, political structures, cultures, and customs through personal experience,” as he wrote in his published journals. Four years later, the Weltmuseum advertised “Franz is here!” for a new exhibition on the trip's entirety. It may have been timed with the centenary of his death, but it was the first time Franz Ferdinand's life became, if fleetingly, part of the Habsburg Mythos right on the Ringstraße.Footnote ¹⁵²

One could certainly find more examples of the archduke's emergence in the Austrian public sphere. Yet, the problem with alighting upon these recent, wide-ranging approaches to appreciating Franz Ferdinand and presenting him to a broad audience is that it is unclear to what extent they reshaped Austrian collective memory, or merely the individual memory of those who chose to read the works and see the exhibits. In both cases, moreover, there have always been impactful counternarratives. The 1984 Graz exhibition, for example, coincided with one in Pottenbrunn Palace (St. Pölten) with the potent title—“Austria in the Fateful Year 1914.” And for anyone interested in further exploring the successor's world voyage after visiting the Weltmuseum, there was a newly edited and, in 2013–2014, widely reviewed edition of his travel journals enticingly entitled: “Die Eingeborenen machten keinen besonders günstigen Eindruck” (The Natives Did Not Make an Especially Favorable Impression). This single citation from two hefty volumes says it all in terms of what the editor chose to include in this work, which together with his annotations paints a decidedly unpretty picture of Franz Ferdinand.Footnote ¹⁵³

The new, more positive and nuanced portrayals of the archduke did not, in other words, preclude the preponderance of the usual stereotypes of a “stiff, cold, impersonable” man—“one of the most problematic personalities of the House of Habsburg.” In another news article from the 2000s entitled “Franz Ferdinand: Swindler, Stupid Fool—and an Archduke,” the author insists the heir “would probably have become a nasty dictator” due to his “fanatical art collecting,” kitschy taste, and disapproval of “any appeal against his harsh demands.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ And besides newspapers, popular works from the 1980s renaissance right through the present dependably display Franz Ferdinand's nastiness and narrow-mindedness. In renowned writer Hilde Spiel's Glanz und Untergang (1987), for example, stinginess, fickleness, and tactlessness, in addition to the usual asides about his obsessive hunting and abhorrence of modern art, dominate a disapproving image of the archduke. Frederic Morton shows more balance by bringing up the successor's political skills and preparation for the accession in his widely read Wetterleuchten (1990). Yet, it is the “sinister look,” “martial mustache” (“the fiercest after that of the German Kaiser”), and “imperial gestures” that stand out in his depiction of the “fearsome” Franz Ferdinand, a “brute” best known for his brash outbursts.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Of course, royalty have long been favored targets of writers and artists, and works like Austrian Harald Havas's hilarious Habsburger Sammelsurium (Habsburg Hodgepodge, 2006) have plenty of playful, imperial ridicule to go around. However, he is especially hard on the archduke, who comes in for the kind of analysis only Sigmund Freud himself could have conjured: a “pathological” hunter who never seemed to be photographed in profile—“Perhaps he had none. Defective development.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Still more recently, and seriously, Florian Illies's celebrated storytelling in 1913: Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts (2013) paints Franz Ferdinand as an “irascible, uncontrollable power-politician” nearly gone mad from waiting for his uncle's passing. Like Morton, Illies flatters the “hot-blooded” heir's “adept” diplomacy, even if his character appears anything but flattering, and his hunting as a revolting “bloodbath.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷

This image of the archduke's unsportsmanlike savagery has a literary lineage going back at least to Bruno Brehm. Yet, it was reinforced for contemporaries in the popular film Der Tag, der die Welt veränderte (1975). And even if one might expect as much from a joint Czech-Yugoslav production, the opening scene's contrast between the clever and cultivated young assassins at shooting practice and the barbarous ferocity of Franz Ferdinand's battues could not have been more clear, or crushing, when it came to memory.

Film, in fact, has been consistently unkind to the crown prince. From the stiff, stolid, and chain-smoking cameos in Maresi (1948) and Um Thron und Liebe, to István Szabó's Colonel Redl (1985), in which he deceitfully (and nonfactually) frames the famed Austrian spy Alfred Redl in order to coax the army into war in the Balkans, Franz Ferdinand invariably looks belligerent and unbecoming on the big screen.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ And that holds even when he is hardly present. In Austrian director Peter Patzak's character study of the assassins, Gavre Princip—Himmel unter Steinen (1990), the archduke is degraded to little more than the overdecorated representative of a ruthless colonial power. In Bride of the Wind (2001) about the muse Alma Mahler, he is referenced (right after dying) for his artlessness. And in a new, 2014 Austrian Broadcasting (ORF) film with the insipid title Das Attentat—Sarajevo 1914, the director must have thought that almost anyone in this authentic drama was more interesting than its actual victim. His “sugar-coated” and conspiracy-driven rendition of world history thus placed the examining magistrate Leo Pfeffer front and center.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ It may be a bit of chance, but it is certainly a bittersweet irony that in one of the few film clips we have of Franz Ferdinand he is laughing and dancing at his nephew Karl's wedding. One look at his joyful, jocular face could not contrast more with the image that is routinely presented in film and literature.

Austrian popular memory has not exactly refired a fatal shot through the “ill-fated” Franz Ferdinand, though he has slipped through a Habsburg memory hole of sorts. His name, best associated today with the Scottish rock band and, in Austria, the “Okidoki Mascot” on KidsTV (where he appears as a purple cow with an earring), never became popular in the Second Republic.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Nor has his reputation come close to competing with modern Habsburg icons like Franz Joseph, Rudolf, and Sisi, the latter enjoying a monument in Vienna's Volksgarten, a museum in the Hofburg, and nonstop publicity throughout the city.

Artstetten, of course, remains the main arbiter of the archduke's memory in Austria, with its impressive crypt, permanent and provisional exhibits, and perfectly groomed grounds. Yet, the Franz Ferdinand Museum welcomes just twenty to thirty thousand mostly non-Austrians a year. As in its origins, moreover, the institution receives no regular state-level support and little public funding whatsoever.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Unlike Schönbrunn and the Sisi Museum, Artstetten exists, one might say, much as its namesake: out of the limelight and off the beaten (tourist) path.

Yet, besides public apathy, the Franz Ferdinand Museum, like all collective efforts to commemorate the archduke, has an intrinsic problem—the man it honors, intriguing and, indeed, honorable as he was, never had the chance to achieve his life's purpose. One thus wanders through the thematically arranged rooms learning about his personal history and Military Chancellery with a sense that all this stuff—the letters, furniture, photographs, and so forth—belongs more to a family heirloom than a public repository. This is not an argument against Artstetten, which is a notable achievement by any measure. The museum, moreover, is admirably even-handed—devoting as much space to its subject's obsessive hunting (we learn that he killed 14.8 living creatures per day during his lifetime) as to his reputable role as family man and political reformer. There are even scenes of Sarajevo cultural life in the main exhibit's final room, as the audio recording evokes British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey's famous quote on the eve of the war: “Did the lights of Europe ever come on again?”

Franz Ferdinand flipped no continental switch when he succumbed to Princip's bullet. Yet, Austrian memory remains fixated on his death at the expense of the life the Artstetten museum so ardently promotes and few Austrians will ever visit. As one scholar well put it: “From the viewpoint of both historical research, as from general public interest, [the heir's life] was and is interpreted and appreciated primarily as a sub-species of his death.”Footnote ¹⁶² What makes this statement ring true is that even efforts to correct it often draw in their audiences with allusions to the assassination. The catalogue cover for the aforementioned exhibition in the Graz City Museum featured the iconic illustration of the Sarajevo murders in the Kronen Zeitung (30 June 1914), even as the Introduction decried the kneejerk linkage between the archduke and his demise. Thirty years later for the centenary, the museum presented Konigsmörde, a “psychopolitical installation” in which “the epochal Sarajevo assassination [illustrates] the fateful culmination of a sequence of (attempted) murder, execution and suicide in the Austrian ruling House.”Footnote ¹⁶³ Indeed, to visualize what Austrians mostly imagine of the archduke, just look at the commemorative coin the National Mint manufactured for its 1999 exhibition. On one side is a flattering image of Franz Ferdinand and his Frau. On the other, they are leaving Sarajevo's City Hall moments before their momentous, and memorable, murder.

A similar sense may be had upon seeing the billboards advertising the Austrian Military History Museum in Vienna, in which the heir's bloody tunic and “ill-fated” auto serve to lure visitors.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ This article has thus far neglected this crucial site where Austrians are sure to encounter the archduke. Since Count Harrach donated his car to the museum, that institution has become a repository for everything having to do with Franz Ferdinand's death, including the sofa on which he expired and for which the Austrian government paid 650,000 schillings (€47,000) in the 1990s.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ In 1955, these items were artfully arranged into what is widely promoted as the “Sarajevo Room.” It is a haunting display that attracts hordes of visitors and has been updated several times since, including for the 2014 centenary. Yet, it is a military museum, after all, and was never intended to be about the half century the archduke lived before making way for the repellant period following his museum-worthy murder.

Where else in Austria could one confront the world's most famous archduke? I asked everyone this question when I arrived for my research, though to little effect—apart from specialists, no one I met had visited Artstetten; nor knew of the plaque to Sophie in the Votivkirche; nor noticed the tablet for Franz Ferdinand in Karlskirche; nor seen the stained glass window in Maria Taferl; nor set foot inside the Burgtor. According to one scholar, “even Vienna cognoscente” have no inkling that this huge structure on Heldenplatz houses Austria's official memorial for the two world wars, let alone that Franz Ferdinand is commemorated there as a fallen soldier of the first one.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

The centenary also did little significant to uplift the heir's image. Of course, for those interested, there were endless print articles and public broadcasts; two new biographies (in addition to Aichelburg's aforementioned volumes); interviews with family members fawning over the Friedensfürst; and even trips “on the trail” of the successor from Vienna to Sarajevo. Yet, the best subscribed books, plays, and films focused on the assassination to such an extent that Vienna's Schauspielhaus hosted the world premier of its commissioned work Princip (Dieses Grab ist mir zu klein), by the Serbian playwright Biljana Srbljanović. Meanwhile, there was not even a documentary about the archduke on the centennial of his death, let alone a major conference or other prominent public event. And as usual, the former imperial capital never once paused for an official memorial. Instead those honors were outsourced to Artstetten, where Church leaders led mass and politicians kept their distance.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Is this a problem? Are we perhaps asking too much of Austrian collective remembrance in the case of the uncrowned crown prince, whose however remarkable life is unlikely ever to escape the specter of his overdetermined death? And even if it occasionally does, what can this then tell us? That is, after all, the main purpose of studying memory.

Conclusion: “The First Victim of the First World War”

“His prejudices and feudal bearing notwithstanding,” wrote Robert Kann, Franz Ferdinand “was a man of stature.” Count Czernin, who had much sound criticism of the crown prince, still fashioned him “a known quantity.” And soon after Sarajevo, the British scholar, political activist, and energetic antagonist of the Habsburg Empire, R. W. Seton-Watson, conceded: “I had pinned all my hopes for the future upon [Franz Ferdinand] … He represented a progressive idea in the Europe of today, and all Europe is the loser by his death.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Whatever one may say about the successor, scholars and close contemporaries mostly agree: Franz Ferdinand was neither a foolish nor frivolous man.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ He was obstinate, insolent, arrogant, and abrupt. And he harbored his share of unhelpful prejudices and grudges. But if the archduke knew one thing, it was that the empire he would someday rule was in dire need of reform, and war would only endanger, if not entirely undo, that eventuality. This was no small thing.

Indeed, the fate of millions rested upon it, and when seen from the perspective of the past century, it is hard not to feel nostalgic for the Central European empire Franz Ferdinand so ardently wished to preserve. Some contemporaries, of course, had already written the regime off, as since have scholars with the assistance of hindsight. Yet, as the historian Timothy Snyder recently argued with regard to another Habsburg prince who kept faith with the “fading” monarchy: “It lasted long, and might have lasted longer.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Few contemporaries would so instinctively have agreed as Franz Ferdinand. Perhaps that is why so many who have judged him so severely based on his trying personality and authoritarian tendencies have also praised his political talents and principled ideals. In this sense, there is sad irony in the fact that this was especially true during the undemocratic Ständestaat and Nazi periods.

As for the Second Republic, outside the privately created Artstetten museum, it has proven little more inspired than its interwar precursor in presenting Franz Ferdinand in all his paradoxical ways. Certainly, by the 1980s, new works and exhibitions were probing the successor's life such that, for those interested, his political activity and individuality—foremost as family man and world traveler—could better be appreciated. Schoolbooks and media, moreover, increasingly indicate that his unclear reform plans may well have been what most antagonized south Slavic nationalists in the first place. Yet, public remembrance still privileges the archduke's tragically exploited death over his independently minded life. Thus, while Vienna officials have yet to honor Franz Ferdinand with so much as a street name, some church leaders felt that it was finally time for him and his wife to be brought together in the hallowed Habsburg Crypt. In a small ceremony held on 25 June 1986, a marble plaque was unveiled at the entrance to the chamber containing Franz Joseph's formidable tomb. As one might expect, scant articles on the memorial appeared in the Austrian press. Its language was also unsurprising: “In memory of the first victims of the First World War, 1914–1918.”Footnote ¹⁷¹

One could easily argue that this is the most consistent construction of Franz Ferdinand's memory in Austria. Besides its appearance in countless media outlets and the memoirs of many who mourned him like von Horstenau and Kiszling,Footnote ¹⁷² the Austrian writers Friedrich Würthle, Erika Bestenreiner, and Gerhard Tötschinger all put it at the very beginning of their histories.Footnote ¹⁷³ Even the American scholar Samuel Williamson was unable to resist the metaphor in a work that is nonetheless critical of Austria-Hungary's role in the outbreak of World War I. And the author himself had a taste of this time-honored interpretation in 2011, when a Hohenberg ancestor at Artstetten called the couple the “first fallen” of World War I.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

Thus, in 1986, the same year that Austrian President and former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim was bringing his small and otherwise quiescent state to the forefront of world affairs through accusations of Nazi war crimes, this modest marker to imperial victimization eased a few more consciences concerning the century everyone was anxious to put behind them, if not consign to collective forgetfulness altogether. After all, if Austrians could hardly avoid the fact that one of their own started World War II, they were far less ready to accept responsibility for the mythicized monarchy's role in World War I.

The problem for the historian, however, is that World War I did not begin until several weeks after the archduke and his wife were safely ensconced in their Artstetten sarcophagi. And while Franz Ferdinand was the victim of a lot of things—the abysmal security in Sarajevo; the blinkered pride of Bosnian Governor-General Oskar Potiorek; his own bloated ego and imperiousness—he was not a victim of the war any more than Austria was the “first victim” of Nazi Germany, as collective national memory only started accepting in the 1980s. The pleasing phraseology that adorns the memorial plaque in the Kaiser Crypt, is implicit in the Burgtor, and has cropped up in public, private, and even scholarly discourse ever since the onset of hostilities is no more than an efficient, if instinctive, way to distort the memory of the one man who would have done everything in his power to prevent the war his death propelled and promote the peace his empire required.

Was such reform actually feasible for Austria-Hungary? Was Franz Ferdinand the man to mandate it? Such counterfactual inquiry can never be known, even if it will always be tied to the successor's legacy. Memory, however, does not have to adhere to facts in order to shape our understanding of the past. Its purpose is more emotional, easing our consciences by allowing us the luxury of avoiding truth, without feeling that we are being untruthful. Because as all Austrians, and all of us, surely know, the first victim of World War I was a much younger man than Franz Ferdinand, who also had his life's ambitions before him. If that were to become central to collective Austrian remembrance, then it would be hard to forget that not only was there nothing “fateful” about 28 June 1914, but there were still millions of lives to be lived, and perhaps even an empire to be stabilized and secured for the modern era.