The Habsburg twilight

Sarah Gainham, for decades a celebrated European correspondent for the London Spectator during the post WWII years, and the author of Night Falls on the City and other novels of Vienna, writes authoritatively about the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with the perceptiveness and knowledge of that lost civilisation. She recalls eight major characters of Viennese history, from the tragic Crown Prince Rudolf who committed suicide with his young mistress, to the great composer and head of the Vienna Opera Gustav Mahler, the woman who founded the fabled Hotel Sacher, the celebrated journalist Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, or Karl Lueger, the populist Mayor of Vienna whose stridency and amazing successes with the masses recall today's Donald Trump.

As the Kirkus Review writes, "Gainham believes that the notion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's long and irreversible decline was a rationale later thought up by politicians to explain the Central European disasters after 1919". The Empire she describes, under the reformer emperor Franz-Josef, widower of the celebrated Sissi, "was a vital and going concern, a society that attempted to implement universal manhood suffrage before any other major European power, a monarchy that permitted an unusual degree of social mobility, and, finally, a multinational state with tremendous cultural energy".

In her eight sketches of famous personalities from the Empire's last decades, Gainham highlights unusual facts about her subjects' lives and recreates the feel of the glittering, cosmopolitan Imperial Austria.In her lively account, "Franz Joseph," Kirkus Review points out, "was no martinet, but a shy and uncertain man (at least in private matters), neither cold nor humorless, but himself deeply in love with two women--his wife and Katharina Schratt, one of Vienna's foremost actresses. Gustav Mahler was a living embodiment of a career carved by talent--a man who rose from grandchild of a ragpicker to emperor of the Imperial Opera."

Gainham handles details authoritatively, with a great elegance of writing. Her portraits of Herzl, Klimt, and Karl Lueger are discerning, the tale of Anna Sacher and the Hotel Sacher is "a delight". When you have finished her book, you feel you have been allowed a glimpse of a vanished past as well as the understanding of an essential European era.