When I produced a recording of lost works by Alexander Zemlinsky with Riccardo Chailly for Decca Records in 1984, I soon realized that a wealth of music had been lost during the Nazi years that had never been recovered. After initiating and supervising the recording series Entartete Musik for Decca, the first retrospective of major works lost during the Nazi years, I headed research in this subject at London University’s Jewish Music Institute. I was a music curator at Vienna’s Jewish Museum. YUP published one of my books, and I am a co-founder of the Research Center and Archive “Exilarte” based at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts.
This is a novel that is tender and sad, and it relates in a language that is simple and poetic to the atmosphere of the Habsburg Empire during its final days. The novel takes place in the provinces rather than in the capital. Every line of the book can be savored, with every sentence laden with nostalgia for a world that seems like another, kinder planet. It is the world that pre-dated one of my other recommendations, The Strudlhof Steps, in its presentation of people with a sense of purpose, duty, and loyalty, even if not blessed with an abundance of acumen.
These were well-intentioned people trying to hold an empire together of disparate people and cultures. The empire represented an ideal world of Habsburg paternalism to Jews, Slavs, and Hungarians. It is difficult to conclude the book without tears. No cinematic version has done it justice—nothing captures the…
'One of the greatest novels ever written' Philippe Sands
Roth's masterpiece: an epic, moving account of the final days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, told through the fortunes of one family.
Set against the doomed splendour of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Radetzky March tells the story of the celebrated Trotta family, tracing their rise and fall over three generations. Theirs is a sweeping history of heroism and duty, desire and compromise, tragedy and heartbreak, a story that lasts until the darkening eve of World War One, when all is set to fall apart. Rich, epic and profoundly moving, The Radetzky March…
Watson's writing did more than just explain the First World War from the perspective of Germany and Austria-Hungary - although that alone would have been enough to make it a fascinating read - but on top of that it gave me a window into the people themselves as the world they knew was torn apart and their future quite literally blown up before their very eyes.
Winner of the 2014 Wolfson History Prize, the 2014 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the Society for Military History's 2015 Distinguished Book Award and the 2015 British Army Military Book of the Year
For the empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary the Great War - which had begun with such high hopes for a fast, dramatic outcome - rapidly degenerated as invasions of both France and Serbia ended in catastrophe. For four years the fighting now turned into a siege on a quite monstrous scale. Europe became the focus of fighting of a…
Walking the rims of remote crater lakes in Uganda to map a tiny piece of terra incognita was a big childhood dream coming true. I then went from a geography master to studies of conflicts, development & journalism. This brought me to the DRC, India, and Nepal, where I covered war, aid, and revolution. Since 2009 I combine professional environmentalism with freelance journalism, publishing books, and giving lectures. With a great global team of researchers and activists I co-created the largest database of environmental conflicts in the world, which doubled as fieldwork for my book Frontlines.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading nine of Westerman's books, some of them twice. This is literary contemporary history. Aside from a place, a period, and a prism through which to look, Frank combines award-winning literary skills with a journalistic journey. His stories are both big and small, personal and universal. Here he follows a fascinating 20th-century journey of the so-called ‘most pure’ horses of Europe. Through that story, you will find yourself cantering through the nature versus nurture debate that defined much of Europe’s recent history. On top of all that, I also recognise his journey through life, from his studies to ‘development’ work to foreign journalism to literary non-fiction writing on the big issues at the people & places interface.
' "When you touch a Lipizzaner, you're touching history," Westerman was once told. His elegant book offers fascinating proof' Financial Times
Frank Westerman explores the history of Lipizzaners, an extraordinary troop of pedigree horses bred as personal mounts for the Emperor of Austria-Hungary. Following the bloodlines of the stud book, he reconstructs the story of four generations of imperial steed as they survive the fall of the Habsburg Empire, two world wars and the insane breeding experiments conducted under Hitler, Stalin and Ceausescu.
But what begins as a fairytale becomes a chronicle of the quest for racial purity. Carrying the…
I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
Malinowski's pioneering work on people of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea still holds a thrill because, after a century, it remains unique in its depth and precision.
Malinowski was an aristocrat and a snob who, like the armchair thinkers he admired, considered himself a scientist after Darwin. But when World War I broke out, as a Pole in London, he risked deportation to Austria-Hungary or internment as an 'enemy alien'.
Instead, Malinowski remained 'stuck' in the Trobriands for the duration of the War where, with the scrupulousness of one trained in math and physics and the intensity of an 'imprisoned' participant-observer, he produced the first firsthand accounts of indigenous life.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been…
This was, hands down, one of the best historical
romances I've read this year. Great characters, engaging mystery, excellent sex
scenes (one of the best depictions of gaining consent that I've ever read), a
heroine who just won't quit, and a hero who is the quiet strength she needs at
her back.
In addition, there are well-drawn secondary characters
and a setting in Vienna at the beginning of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that's
as sparkling and rich as a sachertorte set to a background of waltz
music. I've enjoyed all the Diana Biller books I've read, but now she's an auto-buy author for me.
It's Ball Season in Vienna, and Maria Wallner only wants one thing: to restore her family's hotel, the Hotel Wallner, to its former glory. She's not going to let anything get in her way - not her parents' three-decade-long affair; not seemingly-random attacks by masked assassins; and especially not the broad-shouldered American foreign agent who's saved her life two times already. No matter how luscious his mouth is.
Eli Whittaker also only wants one thing: to find out who is selling American secret codes across Europe, arrest them, and go home to his sensible life in Washington, DC. He has…
I retired from Drexel University in 2015 after thirty-six years as a professor of German and European History of the 19th and 20th Centuries. My sub-specialty in the History of Technology carried over into publications that over the years focused increasingly on the German army and navy.
When war erupted in August 1914, Germany stationed two ships, battlecruiser Goebenand light cruiser Breslauin the Mediterranean to reinforce the fleets of her allies, Italy and Austria-Hungary. Together they planned to overwhelm outmatched British and French vessels and clear the way for an Italian invasion of southern France. In a shocking development, however, Italy remained neutral, Austria-Hungary’s lesser squadrons remained in port, and Goeben and Breslau were forced to flee from British pursuers. In an exciting chase – somewhat of a story twist on the Royal Navy’s hunt and sinking of Hitler’s battleship Bismarckin May 1941 – British ships failed this time and the German escapees fled through the Dardanelles to Istanbul, joined the navy of the Ottoman Empire, and facilitated Turkey’s entry to the war on Germany’s side.
Adam Hochschild is the author of ten books. The era of the First World War figures in his latest, Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, and is the major subject of his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. To End All Wars has been translated into seven languages, won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is at work now on a book about the First World War era and its aftermath in the United States.
This book brings to life a part of the war Western readers know far too little about: the vast battles that ranged back and forth across Eastern Europe and Russia. Two of the three armies involved, those of Tsarist Russia and Austria-Hungary, were spectacularly incompetent, and saw their soldiers needlessly slaughtered by the millions before these two empires dissolved under the war’s impact.
On the outbreak of war in 1914, the armies of the western front soon became bogged down in the mud at Flanders. But on the wide plains and forests of Eastern Europe the three great Empires - Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary - grappled in a series of battles involving millions of men and hundreds of miles of front. Shortly after the outbreak of war the Russian "steamroller" had lurched into Prussia only to be hurled back amind the marshes of Tannenberg. For the next three years the fighting swung indeterminately back and forth. This work describes the campaigns which provoked…
Adam Zamoyski is a British historian of Polish origin. He is the author of over a dozen award winning books. His family originates in Poland. His parents left the country when it was invaded by Germany and Russia in 1939, and were stranded in exile when the Soviets took it over at the end of World War II. Drawn to it as much by the historical processes at work there as by family ties, Zamoyski began to visit Poland in the late 1960s. His interest in the subject is combined with a feel for its connections to the history and culture of other nations, and a deep understanding of the pan-European context.
This book not only tells the fascinating story of the great siege in 1914-15 of the supposedly impregnable fortress of Przemyśl. It is a highly readable and often darkly humorous account, based on an extraordinary array of sources in several languages, paints a vivid picture of the political and military shambles into which the Austro-Hungarian Empire had fallen. With chilling precision, it also identifies the presence of many of the germs which would flourish into the horrors which visited the same area in the following decades.
A prizewinning historian tells the dramatic story of the siege that changed the course of the First World War
In September 1914, just a month into World War I, the Russian army laid siege to the fortress city of Przemysl, the Hapsburg Empire's most important bulwark against invasion. For six months, against storm and starvation, the ragtag garrison bitterly resisted, denying the Russians a quick victory. Only in March 1915 did the city fall, bringing occupation, persecution, and brutal ethnic cleansing.
In The Fortress, historian Alexander Watson tells the story of the battle for Przemysl, showing how it marked the…
Stories of the small adventures and ruminations of a
wealthy old man in Trieste may not sound that gripping. But our protagonist,
Zeno Cosini, is a really compelling and funny portrait of pedantic self-absorption.
The
book has qualities akin to Diary of a Nobody, though Zeno’s world is far
more elevated than Charles Pooter. This was the author’s last book and is
unfinished but with this new translation, by Frederika Randall, it’s a charming
classic.
A newly translated collection of fiction by the influential Italian modernist, continuing on his landmark work Zeno's Conscience.
A Very Old Man collects five linked stories, parts of an unfinished novel that the great Triestine Italo Svevo wrote at the end of his life, after the international success of Zeno’s Conscience in 1923.
Here Svevo revisits with new vigor and agility themes that fascinated him from the start—aging, deceit, and self-deception, as well as the fragility, fecklessness, and plain foolishness of the bourgeois paterfamilias—even as memories of the recent, terrible slaughter of World War I and the contemporary rise of…
I am the son of Irish rural immigrants who at the age of nearly eighty already occupies several vanished worlds myself: London in the 1950s and 60s, the old world of the European peasantry, and a time when the greatest war in human history was still a daily presence. I spent most of my life as an academic historian writing books for an academic audience. Then, to my surprise, at the tender age of seventy, I discovered that I could write prose that had a certain grace and dignity and which seemed to move people as well as inform them. So, I began a second career as what is called a “writer.”
Josef Roth is now recognized as one of the greatest German writers of the twentieth century. As a historian myself, I was entranced by reading it by the way in which the book catches the vast temporal arc of the transformation and then fall of a society that had for centuries been a major force in European history, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now forgotten, this was the world of Vienna’s great resplendence, then fall.
The story is told through the generational story of one family, the von Trottas. Impending loss is conveyed alongside great affection as a whole world is lost in the disasters of the First World War. The book was first published in English in 1933. In the words of another of Josef Roth’s books, “I was there,” which he was.
THE RADETSKY MARCH is subtle and touching study of family life at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Writing in the traditional form of the family saga, Roth nevertheless manages to bring to his story a completely individual manner which gives at the same time the detailed and intimate portrait of a life and the wider panorama of a failing dynasty. Not yet well known in English-speaking countries, Joseph Roth is one of the most distinguished Austrian writers of our century, worthy to be bracketed with Musil and Kraus.
