Dying Empire

The Dying Empire plunges the reader straight into the Battle of Königgrätz. The decisive victory of the Prussian Army over the Austrians ushered in the final era of the illustrious Habsburg dynasty. 1867 saw the Habsburg's centre of power divided between Vienna and Budapest as, in a dramatic political shift, the Austrian Empire became the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, under the rule of the charismatic and iron-willed Franz Joseph I.

Tells the story of an arrangement that existed for only 51 born of a battle in 1867 it was finally destroyed by war in 1918. Yet this half-century was the most creative, most open and innovative phase of six-hundred years of imperial Habsburg rule.

Spans a period of slow faltering decline towards extinction, and equally a time of hectic vitality. As political and military power ebbed away, cultural power became an end in itself.

Covers the years that gave us many of the names that shaped the last Freud, Schiele, Klimt, Kafka, Wittgenstein.

The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy has presented a unique problem in European history -- each new successor state has made a great effort to start afresh, to build its own national history, art and culture, and to deny their defunct collective heritage. Andrew Wheatcroft strips the histories back to their origins in the Habsburg dynasty and tells a revelatory story of power, wealth, scandal and passion.