The descendants of Archduke Karl Stephan of Austria

[Norbert]

as a side line ...."The red Prince' by Tim Snyder and published by Bodley Head has just come out. It's about the AD Wilhelm who was offered the throne of Ukraine in WW1 and his family. His father AD Karl Stephan was the candidate for the Polish throne. just up our street eh?

[britt.25]

The books sounds great. I really does not know much on Archduke Wilhelm, son of Archduke Karl Stephan and M. Theresia, from the Tuscany line.
Do you know what it might cost and where one can order it?  Have you already bought or read it?
It's interesting, because Karl Stephan was the brother of Archduke Friedrich, so Wilhelm was indeed the nephew of Friedrich & Isabella!

[Norbert]

it retails at £20 but will be cheaper on Amazon in a few months time....but I'll buy it anyway, tomorrow ;-)

[Eric_Lowe]

I read that book and coresponded briefly with the author (who was kind enough to answer some of my questions). Wilhelm was gay but dallied with women during the 2 worldwars. The book was very informative and made me want to know more about her sisters who married Poles (Reneta and Mathilde) and another (Eleanora) who married morganetically with permission from Franz Joesf. I highly recommended it ! 

[britt.25]

That sounds very fascinating. I always wanted to know more about those sisters you mentioned. Especially Renata interests me a lot, because her son was the husband of Marie Bonapartes daughter Eugenie of Greece. Do her descendants descend from the line....!
I did not know about the role, which Franz Joseph played in that connection...Are there pictures of Renatas children?
There are also still many descendants from the mentioned Eleonore, who married Alfons von Kloss. I have very shortly read that it caused much critics or voices against that she married him. So it would be simply fascinating to know more....Is this book also translated into German??? Surely not, or yes....?

[Eric_Lowe]

Good lets do it. I just got a postcard of Eleanora and her husband on ebay a while ago. Indeed the book is political on the question of the Polish and Urkraine question. I didn't know Wilhelm existed until this fasinating book. Yet it covered only the family of Albrerch and his Swedish wife Alice. It gave little attention to the rest of the family. Noetheless it is a book not to be missed.  nonetyhe

[britt.25]

Lovely picture of Karl Stephan and Maria Theresia as well as their children....I like it a lot:





It seems the mentioned Archduke Wilhelm is the very very little one, as we see. NR. 69.


I found here a wedding picture of Benedikt count of Piatti, great-grandson of Archduke Karl Stephan (line of his son Leo) and it's amazing how like looks like Karl Stephan....!!! He married a Habsburg from the Hungarian line, Margarethe...




And....this nice card of Archduke Carl Albrecht is one of my favourite. He was really good looking, elegant military style...





As well as this one; Princess Renata Radziwill and her husband....




Does anyone know, if their marriage was happy or not? Are there any pictures of her with her children? Please tell me, if so. I have never found any.

[Eric_Lowe]

No...me neither but I know they had children. The couple and children moved to Brazil later on and I think Reneta died there. 

[britt.25]

For me interesting, because her son Dominik was son-in-law of Princess Marie Bonaparte and is ancestor of her descendants.
It's funny because his famous ancestor Archduke Karl of Teschen fought against Napoleon...
I have only seen one wedding pic of Eugenie with Dominik, but none of the siblings...a pity.That they went to Brazil was completely new to me! Interesting, I also did not know that Renata died there...are those infos from the book, you mentioned?
I really MUST have it!!!

[Eric_Lowe]

Indeed...The book mentioned that Reneta and her husband left for Brazil later and she died there in the 60's. Eleanora and her husband had a few sons who died in the great war. Leo married an Austrian Aristocrat but remained childless. The book focused mostly on Albrerch and his Swedish wife Alice plus family.It records that their daughter Marijia Krystina is still living in Pol;and near the old estate of her parents. The rest of the book is about Wilhelm, "The Red Prince". A recommended read ! 

[britt.25]

Great info!!!! I must order the book!

[britt.25]

I found this review...maybe anyone is interested, I still have to read it after posting

How the dandy turned hero as Europe burned

Reviewed by Brendan Simms
Friday, 11 July 2008

A character in one of Karl Kraus's satires once described the sitaution of the Habsburg Empire as "desperate, but not serious". I was reminded of this when reading Tim Snyder's riotous and engrossing The Red Prince: the fall of a dynasty and the rise of modern Europe. Who can resist a hero, Wilhelm von Habsburg, who "could handle a sabre, a pistol, a rudder, or a golf club" and who "handled women by necessity and men for pleasure". Or his relative, the Archduke Ludwig Viktor – known as "Lutziwutzi" among his many close friends – who wore skirts and was exiled to a castle near Salzburg in order to get him away from the capital's bath houses? Or the tragic Mechtildis, who went up in smoke with her dress, attempting to conceal a cigarette from her father?


So if Snyder's book is sometimes a little overwritten, especially in the opening chapters, this may be excused by the intrinsically over-wrought nature of his subject matter. Still, was it really necessary to compare the shape of Austria to that of a "voluptuous woman sitting on a rock", or to write that "every national revolution, like every bout of lovemaking, owes something to the one that came before"? On the other hand, there are also some very felicitous passages, including neat wordplays on the relative Habsburg skill in war and marriage.

In any case, the most important choices and identities analysed in this study were not sexual but national. Wilhelm von Habsburg – who belonged to a collateral branch of the imperial family in Vienna – made history by embracing the Ukrainian national cause, at that time the most unglamorous on offer, at least compared with that of the more aristocratic Poles and Hungarians.

In part, this was typical Habsburg strategy. Most of the empire's many nationalities had some form of patron in the family; it was a way of hedging against irredentist tendencies. In part, it was sibling rivalry: his elder brother, the Archduke Albrecht, had opted for the more fashionable Poles, with whom the Ukrainians were bitterly contesting the Habsburg province of Galicia. But Wilhelm's choice seems primarily to have been made out of genuine affection for his new people, whose language he learned, whose uniform he wore and whose cause he defended with passion, if not always wisdom.

This sincerity was to be sorely tested in the 20 years after the end of the First World War. For the Ukrainian people were to experience if not the most intense, then perhaps the most prolonged via dolorosa of the mid-20th century. Wilhelm was forced to look on impotently as the new state was partitioned between a resurgent Poland to the west and the Soviet Union to the east. In his despair, Wilhelm turned to a sinister assortment of businessmen, proto-fascist politicians, and military adventurers, most of them German.

He became the ancient mariner of the émigré circuit, button-holing anyone who cared to listen in support of armed insurrection in Ukraine. When none of these schemes bore fruit, and as the Ukrainian people groaned under Stalinist oppression and man-made famines, Wilhelm took up with the Nazis.

He, who had previously never had a bigoted bone in his body, began to spout the anti-Semitic phrases of the day. When his brother's estates in Poland went down to the Nazis in 1939, Wilhelm could see only the opportunity for a Ukrainian national revival under the auspices of the Third Reich.

He was to be disappointed once again. The Nazis were prepared to use Ukrainian collaborators, but they had no intention of allowing the reconstitution of an independent state on an equal basis.

Stationed well away from the action in Vienna, Wilhelm turned against Hitler and, in the final stages of the war, provided valuable intelligence to the allies at considerable risk to himself. Subsequently, he was abducted by Soviet intelligence from Vienna and died in custody from tuberculosis in Kiev in 1948. It is a grim story, and Snyder is to be congratulated for bringing his formidable linguistic and archival skills to bear on a man who was born Austro-Hungarian, became Ukrainian and was, in many ways, wholly European.

There is a happy end of sorts. As Snyder notes in his part-elegiac, part-eulogistic conclusion, an independent Ukraine emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union in. In the recent Orange Revolution, Ukrainian democrats prevailed, "warming the air and the cobblestones by making bilingual love in their orange tents". Today, in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv – which a younger Wilhelm would have called Lemberg – there is a small square named after him. If there is ever a monument erected to Wilhelm on the empty platform in the middle, then he will surely have Tim Snyder to thank for the honour. Brendan Simms's 'Three Victories and a Defeat' is published by Penguin



I have seen that they have it at Amazon..the Prince starts with 13 Euro, not bad, but I think they don't send from the US to Germany. A pity...

[Eric_Lowe]

I think anywhere they have American bookstores like in Munich or Berlin, you might find it. Good luck ! 

[britt.25]

I have seen that is has a portrait (of Archduke Wilhelm???) on the cover in a typical expressionistic style.
Is this the one you have, too?

[Eric_Lowe]

Yes...That is the jacket photo. However it is not a portrait of Wilhelm. Just like the cover of "Born To Rule" 's cover is not one of Queen Victoria's granddaughter, but an oil portrait of a nobody...