The World полностью

While decadent Vienna reflected the Habsburgs’ multi-ethnic empire, the archaic kaiser ruled the k. und k. (kaiserlich und königlich – imperial and royal) monarchy through its rigid hierarchy of nobility and bureaucracy. A typical example of this species was Alois Hiedler, inspector of customs at Braunau am Inn. Born illegitimate when his mother Maria Schicklgruber got unexpectedly pregnant, he later assumed the name of his stepfather (probably his real father) Hiedler.

Alois was an irascible, taciturn, hard-drinking bully but also capable. Lacking the usual education, he rose by merit, proud of his uniform, demanding to be addressed as Herr Oberoffizial Hiedler. His hobbies were beekeeping, beer drinking and skirt chasing: his love life was chaotic and semi-incestuous, as he fathered children with various women, of whom a daughter Angela survived, before he began an affair when he was already married with a cousin or half-niece hired as a maid called Klara Pölzl, twenty-three years his junior. After the death of his wife, he married Klara. Their first three children died young, two of the same bout of diphtheria. In April 1889, when Hiedler (now spelt Hitler) was fifty-one, Klara gave birth to a third, Adolf, followed by a daughter Paula. Another son died of measles. Far from having a harsh childhood, Adolf enjoyed a comfortable upbringing on Alois’s generous salary. Alois occasionally beat him but such discipline was almost universal at that time. Adolf found schoolwork ‘laughably easy’ and bathed in his mother’s passionate love, which granted him boundless self-confidence and self-indulgence. If anything, he was loved too much.

Oberoffizial Hiedler retired to a farm aged fifty-eight but dropped dead in 1903 when Adolf was thirteen, Paula six. Adolf had disdained his father’s bureaucratic pomposity, believing himself destined to be an artist. Moving to Linz, Klara, affectionate and devout, raised the children, encouraging Adolf’s indolent dreaming and supporting his yearning to study art. Hitler’s relations with his sisters were cool – ‘stupid geese’, he called them – though he was closer to Angela. Early on, adults noticed his ‘remarkable eyes’: ‘He had his mother’s light-coloured eyes … her penetrating stare.’ Escaping from his dull family, he set off to become a famous artist in Vienna, where there was a new heir: Franz Ferdinand.

MODERN MONARCHS: FRANZ FERDINAND AND SOPHIE, PEDRO AND ISABELLA, DARLING WILLY

He was son of the emperor’s brother, who, in yet another blow, had died on pilgrimage to Jerusalem after drinking the waters of the River Jordan. Franz Ferdinand was fixated on royal hierarchy and shooting anything, from elephants to the 272,511 birds and beasts listed in his diary, but he was at least conscientious. Even so, he shocked the emperor by falling in love with a non-royal noblewoman, Sophie Chotek. Franz Josef finally allowed them to marry morganatically (meaning their children would be excluded from the succession).

A short-tempered, arrogant but intelligent champion of autocracy, Franz Ferdinand travelled the world to prepare himself. Setting up a military chancellery at his residence the Belvedere Palace, he thought about the problems facing the monarchy. He believed the empire needed to offer the Slavs a partnership similar to that of the Hungarians: ‘Irredentism in our country … will cease immediately if our Slavs are given a comfortable, fair and good life.’ Franz Ferdinand repeatedly warned against confrontations with Serbia that would bring in Russia.

Franz Josef’s first cousin Emperor Pedro had now ruled Brazil for fifty-eight years, and Brazil was almost the last Atlantic slave-owning society. Weary of power, Pedro travelled the world and left his daughter, Isabel, in charge, but her French husband Gaston became hated as an avaricious foreigner. In 1881, the royal jewels were stolen from the palace, and when two servants were suspected, Pedro protected them – to public outrage. Pedro aimed to abolish slavery slowly to avoid revolts and an agricultural crash. In 1885, the Sexagenarian Law freed slaves at sixty. Finally, on 13 May 1888, Isabel abolished slavery and freed 700,000 slaves, generating a surge of popularity as Redeemer of the Blacks. While black people supported the monarchy, forming a Black Guard to defend it, many planters became republican.