A Tale of Three Cities

Fülszöveg

The three cities of Ernst Roth's delightful memoir are Vienna, Budapest and Prague-imperial and royal capitals of the old, departed Habsburg Empire. Into this world, in the last years of the old order, Ernst Roth was born, citizen of Prague in the "crown land" of Bohemia, subject of His Imperial Majesty Franz Joseph. A Tale of Three Cities is a fascinating evocation of that lost world which at the turn of the century stretched from Switzerland to the Russian bordér and from Poland to the Adriatic. Within its borders it embraced a dozen different nationalities of no common stock but bound together by a gravitational force which drew them all towards Vienna at the heart and centre of the Empire. Ernst Roth recreates that lost world with all its splendours and all its absurdities. Above all, this is a book about people, observed here with affection, with compassion and with delightful humour. In his remembrance of things past, Dr Roth combines with anecdote and reminiscence an acutely perceptive sense of history. He writes with a sharply ironic wit and a marvellously civilised ability to explain to the reader how it was that the largest and most enduring of all European empires contrived to endure, despite the shocks to which its vulnerable system was constantly exposed. Here are the qualities and failings, the achievements and the disasters, the shadow and the substance continued on backflap Vissza