Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914
by Frederic Morton
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Book Summary Information
Author: Frederic MortonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-04
ISBN: 0306810212
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Book Reviews of Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914
Book Review: Gathering storm
Summary: 5 Stars
I can think of few other books, save Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station and Andrei Biely's St. Petersburg, that so brilliantly captured the spirit of a time, bringing key figures to life and recreating a vibrant sense of being there. In this case the scene is Vienna, on the eve of the Great War. I was captivated.
And what a cast of characters! Russian revolutionaries (Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky), aristocrats and courtiers of the Habsburg dynasty (foremost among them the Emperor Franz Joseph and the Crown Prince, Franz Ferdinand); future catalyst of WWII, Adolf Hitler; and a host of intellectual and artistic giants such as Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Oskar Kokoschka, and Arnold Schönberg. Impressively, the main narrative thread isn't lost in this colorful swirl of personages; in fact, for a reader with even a modest grounding in European history and culture, these numerous fleeting appearances only add to the vibrancy of the tale.
I was swept up immediately by Morton's heady prose -- at times, I confess, I found it to dip rather heavily into the symbolic or engage in the overly rhetorical flourish -- but still his writing has undeniable evocative power. Here, for instance, is a passage describing the eccentric habit of a struggling artist living in poverty in a Viennese "men's home":
"....Now the brush would drop from his hand. He would push the palette aside. He would rise to his feet.
"He began to speak, to shout, to orate. With hissing consonants and hall-filling vowels, he launched into a harangue on morality, racial purity, the German mission and Slav treachery, on Jews, Jesuits, and Freemasons. His forelock would toss, his color-stained hands shred the air, his voice rise to an operatic pitch. Then, just as suddenly as he had started, he would stop. He would gather his things together with an imperious clatter, stalk off to his cubicle.
"And the others would just stare after him."
That, of course, was a sketch of Adolf Hitler.
But what most struck me after reading A Distant Thunder is how well Morton had made clear the causes of World War I. Of course, every school boy knows that the trigger was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Like me, however, many have undoubtedly wondered just who was this Franz Ferdinand to have set off such a sequence of cataclysmic events. Morton makes the ill-fated Crown Prince the central character of his book, and in doing so infuses it with heavy irony, for Franz Ferdinand was, despite all his bluster, a constant advocate of peace, not war. That the Great War was begun ostensibly on his account was the supreme irony.
Morton adroitly renders a sympathetic but unsentimental portrait of Franz Ferdinand, highlighting his problematic relationship with his uncle, the Emperor, and his devotion to his wife Sophie, whom he had married contrary to Habsburg wishes. If there is a tragedy here beyond the insane march to war, it is this story of a prince and the sacrifices he made for his beloved wife, who was continually slighted by a court intent on keeping her down among the "non-royals" in its merciless pecking order.
Finally, as an occasional visitor to Vienna, a city I've long admired, I'm greatly looking forward to reading Morton's other Vienna-inspired history, A Nervous Splendor, which deals with the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889.
Summary of Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914
Thunder at Twilight is a landmark of historical vision, drawing on hitherto untapped sources to illuminate two crucial years in the life of the extraordinary city of Vienna?and in the life of the twentieth century. It was during the carnival of 1913 that a young Stalin arrived on a mission that would launch him into the upper echelon of Russian revolutionaries, and it was here that he first collided with Trotsky. It was in Vienna that the failed artist Adolf Hitler kept daubing watercolors and spouting tirades at fellow drifters in a flophouse. Here Archduke Franz Ferdinand had a troubled audience with Emperor Franz Joseph?and soon the bullet that killed the archduke would set off the Great War that would kill ten million more. With luminous prose that has twice made him a finalist for the National Book Award, Frederic Morton evokes the opulent, elegant, incomparable sunset metropolis?Vienna on the brink of cataclysm.
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