In his last, posthumously published book, Language and Solitude (1998), the philosopher Ernest Gellner coined a phrase: the "Habsburg dilemma". Gellner defined it as "the principle that a culture is most stridently defended when it is irretrievably lost". The Habsburg dilemma thus explains our hankerings for all sorts of imaginary golden ages, Edens, ancien régimes, and the television programmes of our youth. We love what we have lost: it's human nature, and human history. But there is perhaps another, more fundamental Habsburg dilemma: how on earth to begin to sum up the greatest imperial dynasty in the world, ever?
As every schoolchild used to know, the fall of the Habsburg empire should have marked the beginning of European freedom, but instead ushered in the age of the dictators. Or as Edward Crankshaw puts it, rather more elegantly, in The Fall of the House of Habsburg (1963): "The national States which arose on the ruins of the supra-national Empire would surely inaugurate a new era of enlightenment, in which small nations, freed from the dead hand of Imperial oppression, would develop and unfold in prosperous amity. But the new arrangements did not last and the hope was not fulfilled." Hence our hankerings for the Habsburgs.
In what remains one of the clearest and concisest introductions to the complex history of the Habsburg family, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire 1815-1918 (1989), Alan Sked begins by pointing out: "Between the 13th century and the 20th they provided rulers for empires, kingdoms, duchies and principalities in modern-day Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland and Hungary." Alas, we don't have time here to consider all six centuries' worth of Habsburg rulers, so we'll bend our knees and doff our caps merely to the first, the last, and one or two of the famous ones in between.
According to legend, the Habsburgs took their name from their home, the Habichtsburg – Hawk's Castle – in what is now the canton of Aargau, in Switzerland. The first member of the family to bear the name was Count Werner I, but the first Habsburg of any real note is Rudolf, who was crowned emperor of Rome in 1273. Within a few years, through dynastic marriages, intermarriages, alliances and conquests, the Habsburg family territories extended to Austria, Bohemia and beyond. More dynastic marriages, intermarriages, conquests and alliances followed, along with the inevitable family feuds, schisms and splits, until by the time of the reign of Charles V, the Habsburgs reigned over an empire on which the sun never set, stretching across Europe into Africa, Mexico and Peru. Charles's personal motto, appropriately, was "Plus ultra" (further beyond), though by 1555 he seems to have gone as far as he cared to go, handing over his titles and responsibilities to his brother and his son, and retreating to a monastery in Spain, where he tended to his garden and contemplated his famous collection of clocks.
Time passed. Empires fall. The official end of the Habsburg empire came on 11 November 1918, when Emperor Charles I (Karl Franz Joseph), King of Hungary, King of Bohemia and Croatia, and Galicia and Lodomeria, made his famous proclamation: "Filled now as ever with unchangeable love for my people I will no longer set my person as a barrier to their free development ... The people has now taken over the government through its representatives."
The current head of the House of Habsburg is Karl Habsburg-Lothringen, grandson of Charles I. Karl is a member of the European Parliament. He was also at one time, apparently, the host of an Austrian TV gameshow called Who Is Who?