The Assassination of the Archduke

Fülszöveg

The Assassination of the Archduke
Sarajevo 1914 and the Romance That Changed the World Greg King and Sue Woolmans
Drawing on rare primary sources and new interviews with Hapsburg descendants, King and Woolmans explode the myths and tell the true story behind the assassination that sparked World War I
When summer 1914 opened, Europe was dominated by three great Empires: Austria Hungary, Germany, and Russia. By the end of World War I, all three monarchies had disappeared from the face of the earth. One event precipitated the conflict, and at its heart was a tragic love story. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was heir to an empire with millions of subjects, many of whom resented the central government. When he chose to many for love against the wishes of the Emperor and the Court, he and his wife were marked for destruction by reactionaries who feared their modernizing influence. King and Woolmans prove that they were deliberately sent to Sarajevo, a city seething with revolutionary... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The Assassination of the Archduke
Sarajevo 1914 and the Romance That Changed the World Greg King and Sue Woolmans
Drawing on rare primary sources and new interviews with Hapsburg descendants, King and Woolmans explode the myths and tell the true story behind the assassination that sparked World War I
When summer 1914 opened, Europe was dominated by three great Empires: Austria Hungary, Germany, and Russia. By the end of World War I, all three monarchies had disappeared from the face of the earth. One event precipitated the conflict, and at its heart was a tragic love story. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was heir to an empire with millions of subjects, many of whom resented the central government. When he chose to many for love against the wishes of the Emperor and the Court, he and his wife were marked for destruction by reactionaries who feared their modernizing influence. King and Woolmans prove that they were deliberately sent to Sarajevo, a city seething with revolutionary violence, in the hope they would be killed.
Set against a backdrop of glittering privilege and an Imperial Court consumed with hatred, The Assassination of the Archduke paints a portrait of a couple who were deeply in love, devoted to their children, and determined to bring Austria-Hungary into the modern world. Instead, they were murdered in cold blood, their empire destroyed and their children doomed to go from magnificent castles to the horrors of concentration camps under the Nazis. Using a documentary technique similar to books about another famous assassination in Dallas fifty years later, this book lays bare the lethal circumstances surrounding that fateful Sunday morning in 1914 and the hidden forces that may have sent them to their deaths.
PRAISE
"Covers the subject so thoroughly and so honestly that this is almost certainly the last book that needs to be written." —Robert K. Massie, author of Nicholas and Alexandra on The Resurrection of the Romanovs
"Wonderfully vivid. a worthy companion to Edvard Radzinsky's The Last Tsar." — Publishers Weekly on The Last Empress
GREG KING is the author of eleven previously published books, including the UK bestseller The Duchess of Windsor, and the internationally acclaimed The Fate of the Romanovs. The Court of the Last Tsar, and the forthcoming Resurrection of the Romanovs.
A BBC manager in London, SUE WOOLMANS is a royal historian and writer. She recently edited the memoirs of Tsar Nicholas II's sister, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, entitled Twenty-Five Chapters of My Life with Paul Kulikovsky. Vissza