Hitler and the Habsburgs
Page 23
The funeral Mass of the Catholic Church and the liturgical prayers were identical to those used in 1914 for their parents. The family selected a six-word epitaph to carve on Ernst Hohenberg’s tomb. It read, “He was a loyal, honest Austrian.”
Later when Sophie Nostitz-Rieneck thought of Ernst’s funeral at Artstetten, what she may have most remembered was the next generation of Hohenbergs who were there. They had all grow into adulthood. Her youngest child was a married woman of twenty-five expecting her first child.
The year of Ernst’s death, Franz Janacek also died, breaking another link with the past. He had been in service to the Hohenberg family since before any of them had been born. With the death of Ernst, the loss of her oldest two sons, Franz Janacek’s passing, and the next generation of Hohenberg children grown and having children of their own, Franz Ferdinand’s daughter must have felt much older than her fifty-three years.
Nine months after Ernst’s funeral, the Soviet Union finally agreed to end its decade-long occupation of Austria. Communist autocrats in Moscow continued to control the rest of eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia for thirty-five years; but the end of the occupation offered Austria and the Hohenbergs a fresh beginning.
The 1955 treaty restoring Austrian independence was signed in Vienna’s Belvedere Palace by former Chancellor Leopold Figl. Like Max and Ernst Hohenberg, Figl had once been labeled an enemy of the state by the Nazis and imprisoned for high treason by Adolf Hitler.
Sophie Nostitz-Rieneck and Maximilian Hohenberg thought the location of Belvedere an excellent site for the historic event. Their mother and father had always loved the palace, and the signature on the treaty by a fellow Dachau survivor would have delighted Ernst. Their younger brother had always liked Leopold Figl and the palace where they spent much of their happy childhood. The event seemed to exorcize any association of it with Adolf Hitler.
Once the Hohenbergs were free of their Russian overseers, Elisabeth and Maximilian surprised their sons by removing two walls at Artstetten to reveal a secret room. Before the war, a hallway had been boarded up and plastered over to create a storage space to hide priceless paintings, furniture, and family heirlooms. The Nazi and Russian looters who ransacked Artstetten and the youngest of the Hohenberg children had no idea the room was there. When everything was brought into the light of day, they always remembered the event as a second Christmas.
Among the hastily packed artifacts was the collection of ceramic lambs Franz Ferdinand had given his wife throughout the thirteen years of their marriage. When Sophie Nostitz-Rieneck learned her father’s gifts to their mother had been saved, no other buried treasure could have made her happier.
The past surrounded and touched the Hohenbergs nearly every day of their lives, but their children thought little about what had happened before they were born. Georg Hohenberg remembered an epiphany he experienced during a stroll he took with his father. He told his mother about it, but confided in no one else until years later:
We often walked in the gardens of the Belvedere Palace because it was the nearest park to the apartment we kept in Vienna. My father often laughed and said we only moved 500 meters to our apartment from our former home in the Belvedere. I knew he had lived there. It was just a fact of life, but as a child I never thought much about it. Once though he pointed out a window and said, “That is my mother’s sleeping room where I was born.” It was a very touching and fascinating moment, to think that he was born there, and spent his childhood in that beautiful palace.
Suddenly it made the past real and unreal at the same moment. Slowly, I started to understand how much he had lost in his life, and how little I had lost. He was in the place of his birth, yet on the outside of everything he had ever known. It had all been turned upside down. Nothing was the same. To be somebody, then to be nobody would be a horrible thing. Everything was different from what one imagined, but he didn’t seem to feel that way. Over the years I had the opportunity to enter Belvedere Palace many times. My father did too, but he never returned to the palace where he was born.
Maximilian Hohenberg did return to public life beyond the village of Artstetten. He issued a statement that read, “My family has lived in Austria for 700 years, so I hope it doesn’t sound too pretentious if I raise my voice to speak out about the large issues facing the land of my birth.” His decision was prompted in part by the haunting words placed within the gates of the Dachau memorial, “May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1933 and 1945 unite the living in their defenses of peace and freedom and in reverence of human dignity.”
The visit he and Elisabeth had made to Rome also played a part. Pope Pius XII had granted Max special permission to see the Vatican’s famous collection of maps. Looking at the maps of Europe, he lamented the political boundaries dividing the continent. The gentle curator quietly said political and religious leaders divided Europe, and it would take political and religious leaders to unite it. His words echoed the sentiments written at Dachau. Max believed no one was in a better position to make them a reality than Otto Habsburg, but first he had to end his cousin’s Austrian exile.
Otto Habsburg briefly returned to the country following the war, but French occupation authorities deported him. The country’s 1919 constitution continued to read, “Members of the House of Habsburg are banned from entering the land unless they specifically renounce their membership of this House and all its associated claims of sovereignty and declare themselves loyal citizens of the Republic.” The injustice of having to renounce membership in one’s own family, the pain of being a patriot yet considered an enemy of the state, and the loneliness of being an exile from one’s own country spoke to the heart and soul of the Hohenberg experience. Max once again took up his quest to end his cousin’s exile.
Nostalgia for a glorious past, wounds from the Anschluss years, and a decade of communist occupation lingered deep in the Austrian soul. Max believed that if given the opportunity Otto Habsburg was in a unique position to heal his country and bring it together as the young Queen Elisabeth’s recent coronation had done in England. For many Austrians, the Habsburg heir to the vacant throne represented a bridge from the past to the future; but the past meant different things to different people. Otto’s early warnings and denunciations against Hitler, his work to help Jews and others escape the Nazis, and his defense of Austria as Hitler’s first victim made him a hero for some. But for allies of the Nazis, Anschluss supporters, Nazi collaborators, and deniers of the Holocaust, he was the enemy, an uncomfortable reminder of their past.
Max traveled throughout Austria campaigning for a restoration of the constitutional monarchy, but he discovered Hitler’s hate had not died with him. The fervor and scorn once reserved for the country’s Jews was directed at him and his Habsburg cousins. Despite verbal abuse, attacks on his personal character, and physical threats, he refused to give up. More than once his goal seemed within reach. Austria’s Federal Chancellor, Julius Raab, spoke publicly in favor of restoring Otto’s citizenship. A war of words erupted in parliament and the nation’s newspapers. The country’s Interior Minister, Oskar Helmer, assured Max that the majority of Austrians supported his crusade, but an angry vocal minority prevented a resolution to the stalemate.
As 1961 drew to a close, Otto Habsburg asked that all efforts to restore the constitutional monarchy end. After forty-three years of exile he renounced any claims to the vacant throne and asked to simply return to Austria as an ordinary citizen. As Max feared, despite overwhelming public support, opponents continued blocking Otto’s return. The former Crown Prince announced he would take his case to the Austrian courts.
Exhausted, disappointed, and depressed, Max retired to Artstetten to spend a quiet Christmas with his family. On January 8, 1962, Sophie Nostitz-Rieneck received a telephone call. Her fifty-nine-year-old brother had suffered a massive heart attack. He died the following day. Maximilian Hohenberg’s death did what he had always hoped Otto Habsburg would do. For
one brief moment, Austria became united again.
Eighteen miles of mourners choked the roads leading to his Artstetten funeral. Aristocrats stood with Socialists. Atheist and agnostics walked alongside Catholic priests, nuns, and bishops. Dachau’s Jews, Roma, and Jehovah’s Witnesses offered prayers for his soul. Over one thousand people unable to be seated in the church quietly stood outside in the rain until the funeral Mass ended. Royal relatives traveled from Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. Archduke Hubert Salvator, a grandson of Emperor Franz Joseph, represented the Habsburg Imperial Family. Otto von Habsburg asked the government for permission to attend, but his request was rejected. All the living Hohenbergs were there, but Max’s sister, Sophie, must have felt very alone.
Journalists celebrated the contradictions, heights, and depths of his life. Vienna’s conservative Weiner Presse wrote, “He was a Habsburg, who was not permitted to be one, instead he became Austria’s first concentration camp victim. His life ended today, but it began at Belvedere Palace in 1902.” The death caused the anti-monarchist Socialist newspaper Arbeiter Zeitung to salute all the Hohenbergs:
They had every reason to turn on the Imperial House. But they declined to kick the fallen. That the old Habsburg had ceased to exist was precisely why they came out for it. Nor did this keep them from being correct citizens of the republic. … Their convictions were monarchists, but they lived their lives faithful to the law.
A third paper reported:
Today we are joining with his concentration camp comrades one last time to remember Maximilian Hohenberg. … In the same way his parents were the first two victims of World War I, their sons were the first two political prisoners taken to Dachau. He was a man who was not just true to his own house and family, but always to Austria his entire life. This memory will stay with us forever.
Four years after Maximilian’s death, the Austrian Constitutional Court restored Otto Habsburg’s citizenship. Following nearly half a century of exile, the Hohenbergs’ cousin was finally able to legally reenter his own country. Sophie Nostitz-Rieneck welcomed her cousin home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE GOOD FIGHT
“It is not the wounds of life that matter. It is what we do with them.”
—SOPHIE NOSTITZ-RIENECK
“I have fought the good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept the faith.”
—2 TIMOTHY 4:8
In 1981, Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s daughter, who had outlived her younger brothers, two of her four children, and—after fifty-three years of marriage—her husband, Fritz, decided to return to Czechoslovakia for a visit. Alois, her surviving son, his wife, and children traveled with her. They found their former country estates at Falkenau and Heinrichgrun overgrown and in ruins. The crumbling Nostitz-Rieneck coat of arms could still be seen over the main portal of the Falkenau house. In Prague, their Maltese Square home had become the offices of the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Culture. Musical concerts were sometimes played there. The books in the mansion’s world-famous library were gone, but the shelves were not empty. The National Museum’s own library had replaced it.
Sophie and her family retraced the well-worn path to the Our Lady of Victories Church. There she showed her grandchildren the famous Infant of Prague statue. She lit a candle and offered prayers for the living and the dead. They also traveled the thirty miles from Prague to Konopiste Castle. Sophie and her family dutifully bought tickets to enter the home where she had been born. No one recognized the former princess as she joined a large group of tourists shuffling through the castle.
The monotone tour guide rushed from room to room making attempts to amuse the tourists with fabrications about the Archduke, the Hohenbergs, and Konopiste. Sophie quietly whispered corrections to her family about nearly everything the guide said. The lies told about his grandfather angered Alois, but as Sophie’s own mother had done with her father, she gently touched his arm soothing him with a smile. The visit seemed to please her. It allowed her the opportunity to share the truth about her parents and the Hohenbergs’ story with the next generation of her family. Truth was important to her.
Following Fritz’s death, Sophie had moved to Salzburg to be near family, including Max’s widow, Elisabeth. They shared stories about their children and grandchildren, and often laughed and teased each other. The dark sad times were seldom mentioned, but that was the laser focus of questions by inquiring journalists. Newspapers, authors, and historians came to interview Sophie, causing Elisabeth to ask, “Why do you keep speaking with them? They never print what you say. They distort your stories, and only write what they want to write.” Sophie always had the same answer. “The real story has never been told. Maybe the next interview will print the truth.”
When her grandson attended law school in Salzburg, he came to live with her. Three decades later, Count Gutsverwaltung Nostitz-Rieneck’s memories of their time together remained vivid:
My grandmother told me many stories of her youth, of her parents, and of her whole life. … Yet I never heard her speak badly of anyone, never the Serbs who killed her parents, not the Czechs who naturalized her home two times, nor the Germans who took her two sons to die in a war that was not their war. … To live the life she lived without bitterness was a great example to us. …
She kept too busy to hate. She loved to read. She loved music and sports. She loved nature, gardens, and being outdoors, but mostly she loved to laugh. … My favorite memory of her was her laughter. She laughed as if she was a young girl.
I remember once when I lived with her I woke up at 2:00 a.m. and heard her TV on from my little room upstairs. I thought it can’t be. My grandmother never has problems sleeping. I slowly went down the stairs and saw her in her room watching ice hockey. It was two in the morning and she was watching the Czech Republic play Canada. She loved ice hockey perhaps because she played it as a child at St. Moritz with her father. She loved football too. I remember talking with her when the Czech Republic was playing Germany. She always rooted for the Czechs even after she lost her home there two times.
I can’t say she hated Germany, but she never rooted for any of their sports teams. My grandmother’s generation had known so much loss, so many tragedies, yet they still found fun, beauty, laughter and goodness in life. Next to her bed she always kept a photograph of my great-grandparents entering the car in Sarajevo, minutes before they were murdered. On the backside she wrote, “The last steps of my beloved parents—before the assassination on June 28, 1914.” It was a shocking abrupt end to the happy life she and her brothers had known.
Such wounds never heal, yet my grandmother taught us the wounds don’t have to destroy a person. It is not the wounds of life that matter. It is what we do with them.
Two years later, the three great matriarchs of the family, eighty-one-year-old Sophie Countess of Nostitz-Rieneck; Elisabeth, the seventy-eight-year-old Dowager Duchess of Hohenberg; and Ernst’s seventy-three-year-old widow, Maisie, journeyed to Artstetten for a family wedding. Maximilian’s daughter Princess Sophie Hohenberg married Baron Jean de Potesta of Belgium. She was the namesake of her Aunt Sophie and goddaughter of Max’s wife, Elisabeth. The celebration was one of the last times the three remarkable sisters-in-law would be together.
In 1985, Maisie, the Countess Maria-Theresa Wood Hohenberg, died at her home in Radmer. She had been in poor health since her son Ferdinand, who had been confined to a wheelchair since he was a young man, died at the age of fifty-one. Although the youngest Hohenberg woman of her generation, she was the first to die. Maisie returned to Artstetten for the last time and was buried beneath the chapel next to Ernst.
On the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Anschluss, Max’s widow, Elisabeth, also died and was interned at Artstetten. The identical sepulchers of the four Hohenbergs, Maximilian and Elisabeth, Ernst and Maisie, stand side by side, together in death as they had been in life. Just steps away are the tombs of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess of Hohenberg.
Empress Zita, 97, was buried in the Habsburg family crypt beneath the Capuchins Church after a requiem mass in St. Stephen’s Cathedral, in which prayers were read in many of the vast empire’s languages—German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovene, Polish, and Italian. … Communist ruled Hungary’s state television, along with five West European countries, broadcast the funeral live. … The Habsburg empire has become popular again, for its past glories, but also for the political lesson it is thought able to teach central Europe—which has known little but disasters since the Empire collapsed—and to a western Europe looking for new forms of multilateral political organizations.
Five months later, Zita’s son Otto was instrumental in sponsoring a picnic through the Pan-European Organization, the continent’s oldest European unification movement. Attendees met on both sides of the Austro-Hungarian border across from the Hungarian town of Sopron. Picnic-goers were encouraged to bring food, wine, and wire cutters. At two thirty in the afternoon, the border crossing was opened. Hundreds of thousands of eastern Europeans fled into Austria.
Sophie Nostitz-Rieneck lived long enough to see some, but not all, of her father’s dreams realized, and some of the nightmares of her own life wiped away. In 1989, the Velvet Revolution peacefully overthrew the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. The country’s new president, Vaclav Havel, offered a public apology for the expulsion of the nation’s Sudeten “Germans.”