On the first of April 1922, a 34-year-old man lay dying in a rented house on the Portuguese island of Madeira. His wife, pregnant with their eighth child, sat beside him in the same dress she had worn for three days. The room was unheated. Six weeks earlier, he had caught a cold walking home from church. The cold became pneumonia.
The man was Karl I, the last Emperor of Austria-Hungary. He had arrived on Madeira five months earlier, escorted by British officers who had been instructed that he was not to be allowed off the island. He had ruled an empire of 50 million people for two years. Now he was a man with no country, no income, and a failing body.
How a dynasty that had ruled most of Central Europe for 640 years ended up dying in a rented room on a volcanic rock in the Atlantic begins with a law. On the 3rd of April 1919, the new Republic of Austria passed the Habsburg Law. Every member of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine was stripped of Austrian citizenship and banned from Austrian soil. Their palaces, estates, art collections, and family foundations were confiscated without compensation. Their titles were abolished.
A Habsburg could return only on two conditions: a written and unconditional renunciation of all dynastic claims, and an oath of loyalty to the Republic. There was no middle path and no appeal. The Republic that emerged from the wreckage of the Empire could not afford a rival center of loyalty. The surest way to deny one was to make the family stateless inside its own homeland.
Karl himself never signed any of it. In November 1918, at Schönbrunn Palace, he had put his name to a different document, one that recognized the Austrian people's right to choose their own government while pointedly avoiding the word "abdicate." Historians later called it a masterpiece of diplomatic equivocation. Karl meant every comma of it. He believed he was still the rightful emperor on temporary leave from the throne.
The Austrian Republic understood this perfectly. The wording of the law assumed that a Habsburg might one day try to come back, and made sure that when he did, there would be no country left to come back to.
Karl did try to come back. Twice. The first attempt began on the morning of the 26th of March 1921, when the former emperor boarded a train in Switzerland with a false passport in the name of a Spanish merchant. He traveled alone. He arrived after dark at the bishop's palace in Szombathely, in western Hungary. The next morning, Easter Sunday, he climbed into a small car and was driven 150 miles to Budapest to ask for his country back.
The man he came to see was Admiral Miklós Horthy, the regent of Hungary. Horthy had commanded the Austro-Hungarian Navy in 1918 and had spent the chaos that followed quietly building a power base in the countryside. By March 1920, the Hungarian Parliament had named him regent of a kingdom that, by constitutional pretense, was still waiting for its king. The throne he was guarding was, in theory, Karl's.
Karl walked into the palace without an appointment. Horthy was eating breakfast when the door opened and his former emperor walked in. The conversation lasted about two hours. Karl said he had come to take back what was his. Horthy said the moment was wrong. The Little Entente—Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania—had given private notice that a Habsburg restoration in Budapest would mean immediate war. Hungary, Horthy said, would not survive it.
Karl stayed in Szombathely for another week, increasingly ill, while diplomats in Paris denied that France had ever supported him. On the 5th of April 1921, he was put on a train back to Switzerland. The first restoration attempt had lasted 11 days.
The second attempt, in October, was not a quiet train ride. On the 20th of October 1921, Karl and Zita climbed into a small biplane outside Zurich and were flown across the border into Western Hungary. Within hours, loyalist units of the Hungarian army began to assemble around the royal couple. Within two days, a column of about 2,000 men was marching towards Budapest with Karl at its head.
The column reached the suburb of Budörsh on the morning of the 23rd of October. Government forces were dug in across the road. The two sides exchanged fire for several hours. About 40 men died on both sides combined. Karl, watching from the rear, was told that one decisive push would bring the government troops over. He gave a different order. He told his men to cease fire. He could not, he said, be the cause of Hungarians dying to put him back on the throne.
By the next morning, his column had melted away. He was taken into custody on the 24th. The Allied powers had already decided what to do with him. On the 1st of November, British officers escorted Karl and the pregnant Zita to the Hungarian port of Baja, where a river monitor was waiting. The ship took them downstream to the Black Sea, where they were transferred to the cruiser HMS Cardiff. The cruiser carried them around the southern coast of Europe to Madeira. They arrived in Funchal on the 19th of November 1921.
While they were still at sea, the Hungarian Parliament passed a bill formally dethroning the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. Hungary remained a monarchy on paper. It simply no longer had any particular family in mind for the job.
What killed Karl on the 1st of April 1922 was a cold that turned into pneumonia in a house with no heating, on an income of almost nothing, in a climate his lungs could not tolerate. He died holding a small crucifix his wife had pressed into his hand. He had been emperor for one year and 326 days, and an exile for three years and four months. He died believing he was still emperor.
Zita stood at the graveside in black. She was 29 years old. She had seven children with her, and the eighth would be born two months later in a borrowed house in Spain. She had not yet decided that morning that she would never wear another color. But the photographs taken at the funeral and the photographs taken 67 years later when she finally died show the same woman in the same shade of black.
The British cruiser HMS Newcastle put Zita ashore in northern Spain in May 1922, six weeks after her husband's funeral. She came down the gangplank carrying the baby she had given birth to in Lekeitio on the Bay of Biscay, in a borrowed house belonging to a Spanish cousin. The seven older children walked behind her. The oldest was Otto, nine years old, who had been raised since the age of four to expect that he would one day be emperor. He was now the head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.
Zita would spend the next 67 years traveling between addresses, none of which were her own. The first decade was Spain. King Alfonso XIII let them stay in a small palace on the coast, and Zita raised her children there on what she could scrape together from sympathetic European royalty and a few loyal Austrian aristocrats who still sent money. Otto and his brothers were tutored in the languages they would have needed to govern the empire that no longer existed: German, Hungarian, Czech, Croatian, French, English, Spanish.
In 1929, Alfonso XIII lost his own throne, and the family moved on to a rented château in Belgium, where Otto took his doctorate at Louvain. Then in May 1940, with the Wehrmacht advancing through the Low Countries, Zita gathered the children still at home and ran. South through France into Spain, into Portugal, onto a ship in Lisbon, across the Atlantic to New York, and finally to Quebec for the rest of the war.
After 1945, she came back to Europe slowly, and in 1959 settled at Johannisstift, a Catholic residence in Zizers in the Swiss canton of Graubünden. She lived there in two rooms, simply, for the last 30 years of her life.
What Austria was doing to her in those years was absence. In October 1971, Zita's eldest daughter Adelheid was diagnosed with cancer in Pöcking in Bavaria. She was 61 years old. She died on the 2nd of October 1971, and the family arranged for her to be buried at Tulfes in Tyrol, back in Austria where she had not been able to live but where she had asked to be put to rest.
Zita made a formal request to the Austrian authorities for permission to attend the funeral. The request was refused. The Habsburg law was still on the books, and Zita, as the widow of the last emperor, was the person it had been written to keep out. A republic that no longer feared a Habsburg restoration was applying the letter of a law that had been written when it did. Zita stayed in Zizers. She received condolences from the same Austrian government that had told her she could not stand by her daughter's grave.
The law was finally relaxed in 1982. Zita was allowed to return to Austria. She crossed the border on the 17th of August, the day Karl would have turned 95. She was 90 years old herself.
Zita died at Zizers on the 14th of March 1989, aged 96. Her funeral was held in Vienna on the 1st of April, exactly 67 years to the day after Karl's death at the hour he had died. It became the largest public ceremony Vienna had seen in 73 years. The funeral mass was at St. Stephen's Cathedral. The intercessions were spoken in seven languages: German, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Polish, Czech, and Italian. One for each of the major peoples of the empire she had briefly been empress of.
Around 8,000 people walked in the procession behind her coffin. The hearse was drawn by six black Noricum stallions along the same route that had carried Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916. It was the first Habsburg funeral in Vienna since the fall of the empire. Austrian state television broadcast the entire ceremony live.
The coffin reached the Capuchin crypt in the late afternoon. The tradition there is old and exact. A court official knocks three times. From inside, a Capuchin monk asks who seeks entry. The official lists the dead person's full titles. The monk replies that he does not know that person. The official knocks again, gives a shorter list of honors. The monk replies that he does not know that person, either. The third knock. This time, the official says simply, "Zita, a poor sinner, asking for God's mercy." The door opens.
Seventeen years earlier, the door had stayed shut. In May 1961, in a small office in the Bavarian village of Pöcking, a 48-year-old man sat down at a desk and signed a document his mother had told him never to sign. The wording had been negotiated for months with lawyers in Vienna. He expressly renounced his membership of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine and all claims to power derived from it. He declared himself a faithful citizen of the Republic. It was the document the Habsburg law had been written to demand.
Otto von Habsburg signed it anyway. He was the four-year-old boy who had stood beside his father in the cathedral at Budapest in December 1916, watching a crown be placed on his father's head. He had been head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine since his father died on Madeira when Otto was nine. He had spent the next 39 years moving with his mother through Spain, Belgium, the United States, and Canada. In those years he had taken a doctorate in political science at Louvain, worked the corridors of the Roosevelt administration during the Second World War, and reached a private conclusion his mother never accepted. The throne was not coming back.
The 1961 declaration was the price of admission. It gave him, in legal terms, a country. What Austria did with that fact was less generous than the law had implied. The Social Democrats argued in parliament for months that Otto's renunciation was insufficient, that no Habsburg could be allowed back under any circumstances. The crisis pulled the governing coalition apart and very nearly brought the Austrian government down.
Otto did not finally cross the Austrian border again until October 1966, 47 years after he had been carried out of Vienna as a six-year-old. When he arrived, the Austrian trade unions called a one-day general strike in protest. He did not stay in Austria. He went back to Pöcking.
In 1978, he took German citizenship. In 1979, at the first direct election ever held for the European Parliament, he stood as a candidate for the Christian Social Union of Bavaria and won. He sat in Strasbourg as a member of the European Parliament for the next 20 years.
Here is the pivot. Otto von Habsburg was born in 1912 as the Crown Prince of an empire that disappeared six weeks after his sixth birthday. Seventy-seven years later, he organized the border picnic that made the first physical break in the Iron Curtain.
The picnic happened on the 19th of August 1989, on a stretch of fenced grassland between the Hungarian village of Sopronpuszta and the Austrian village of Sankt Margarethen. The cover story sold to the Hungarian government was a friendly Austro-Hungarian celebration of European friendship, a few hours of music, food, and the symbolic opening of an old border gate. The Hungarian government agreed to let the gate stand open for three hours.
The Hungarian organizers had a different plan. They wanted Hungarians to cut pieces of the border fence and carry them away as souvenirs. But by the morning of the 19th, thousands of East Germans were camped around Lake Balaton, two hours east of Sopron. Copies of the picnic leaflet, hand photocopied and passed around the campsites, had reached them in German. They came west by the carload.
By the time the gate opened that afternoon, more than 600 of them were waiting in the fields just inside Hungary. When the gate opened, they went through it. The local Hungarian border commander had been given no clear instruction about what to do if East Germans rather than Austrians crossed the line. He made the decision on the ground. He forbade his men to use their weapons.
By dusk, the field on the Austrian side was empty and 661 people had become refugees. Eleven weeks later, the Berlin Wall was open. The picnic was the first organized mass crossing of the Iron Curtain since 1961. Otto von Habsburg, who had spent his life trying to find a way home, had spent the last day of his political relevance helping 661 strangers find a way through.
Otto von Habsburg died on the 4th of July 2011, aged 98, at his villa in Pöcking. The funeral was held in Vienna on the 16th of July in St. Stephen's Cathedral, the same church where his mother had been laid out 22 years earlier. His coffin made the slow walk down to the Capuchin crypt, and the official knocked at the door three times. The third knock asked entry for Otto, a poor sinner. The door opened and he was laid next to Zita.
His heart went somewhere else. Following an old Habsburg custom, Otto's heart was placed in a separate silver vessel and carried south to the Pannonhalma Archabbey in Hungary, where it was interred a day later. He had been trained as a child to be king of Hungary. He had served the country in the end by helping it become free. The split burial was the family's way of saying both things at once.
In the same year Otto died, the Austrian parliament took the final step on the law that had defined his life. In June 2011, it removed the last remaining clause of the Habsburg law, the prohibition against members of the dynasty standing as candidates for the Austrian presidency. Most of the law had already been quietly dismantled before Austria joined the European Union in 1995. The presidential clause was the last of it with practical force. Ninety-two years after Karl Renner had read the original text aloud, the same parliament removed the last sentence of it that still meant anything.
Otto's eldest son is named Karl. He was born in 1961 in Starnberg, Bavaria, technically stateless at birth, traveling as a child on a Spanish diplomatic passport because no country had yet decided what he was. He took Austrian citizenship eventually, served as a member of the European Parliament for Austria from 1996 to 1999, and since the 1st of January 2007 has been the head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.
What Karl does for a living tells a more interesting story than any title. He founded Blue Shield International in 1996, an organization that protects cultural heritage in war zones, sometimes described as the cultural Red Cross, and served as its first international president until 2020. The work is unglamorous and dangerous. Karl himself has been on fact-finding missions to Libya during the civil war, to Lebanon, and to Egypt after the revolution.
In Ukraine, he is doing something else as well. For more than eight years before the Russian invasion of February 2022, Karl von Habsburg has owned and operated a Ukrainian-language radio network called Kraina FM based in Kyiv. Since the invasion, the staff have continued broadcasting from an undisclosed location. For many Ukrainians outside the major cities, Kraina FM has become one of the essential sources of independent information through three years of war. The grandson of the man who refused to abdicate in 1918 keeps a radio station on the air in a country his great-grandfather never lived to see become independent.
Karl's eldest son is named Ferdinand. He was born in Salzburg in June 1997, and he drives racing cars for a living. In June 2021, at the age of 23, he won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the LMP2 class, a dramatic last-hour win that took the team from sixth on the grid to first across the finish line. He also took the FIA World Endurance Championship title that year in the same class.
His full given names—Ferdinand Zvonimir Maria Balthus Keith Michael Otto Antal Barnum Leonard Habsburg Lothringen—take a paragraph to recite. On the side of his car, the team painted a single word. It read, "Habsburg."
It has been more than a century since Karl I died on Madeira refusing to admit his throne was gone. His widow refused for 67 years. His son spent half a century working out what to be once he had accepted that it was. His grandson keeps a Ukrainian radio station broadcasting through a Russian war. His great-grandson drives a car around Le Mans with the family name on the door.
The Habsburgs lost their empire in November 1918, and they spent the 100 years that followed learning to be Europeans without a throne. The empire is gone. The family is still here.