The Assassination of the Archduke:Sarajevo 1914 and the Romance That Changed the Worldby Greg King and Sue WoolmansSt. Martin's Press, 2013

Chaim and Sholem are walking past a Catholic church when they notice a sign out front: "Convert today, $50."They walk on by, but Sholem says to Chaim, "You know, I think I'll go back and investigate that offer.""What?" Chaim says. "Are you nuts?" But Sholem goes back.Two weeks later, Chaim runs into Sholem again. He asks, "So, did you convert? Did they give you the money?"Sholem replies, "Is that all you people think about?"

By which we learn the dangers of indoctrination.But when a book like The Assassination of the Archduke by Greg King and Sue Woolmans kicks off its proceedings with a Foreword by Her Serene Highness Princess Sophie von Hohenberg, great granddaughter of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the reader might start wondering if there are enough wise old Jewish jokes in the playbook to set things right. The old Habsburg and Austrian nobility were never particularly good at existing in the same reality as the rest of the world, and sure enough, Her Serene Highness isn't three paragraphs into her ten-paragraph remarks before she mentions her ongoing legal battle to recover the family castle. It turns out the Allies, perhaps distracted by 14 million dead, did nothing to stop its expropriation by the Czechoslovakian government - not even when Prince Jaroslav von Thun und Hohenstein threatened to sue. In this one quick Foreword, we are ushered into that network of well-appointed Viennese apartments and Black Forest country houses in which the First World War is still being fought.This is bad, bad company for a pair of historians to find themselves in.2014 marks the hundred-year anniversary of the Great War's beginning. There will be a surfeit of books. Even in the run-up to the big year, bookstores have already been fairly flooded with WWI volumes, especially those dealing with the complicated events of 1914. Authors Greg King and Sue Woolmans are old hands at the publishing game - he's a prolific and very readable biographer, she's a gifted royal historian. They know as well as anybody how badly each of those competing books needs an edge of some kind. An approving Foreword by the great-granddaughter of Archduke Franz Ferdinand is one hell of a coup.It's one hell of a coup because the whole thing started with the Archduke and his wife, Bohemian Countess Sophie, hence the mention in King and Woolmans' sub-title of "the romance that changed the world." Ferdinand was the nephew and heir apparent to Emperor Franz Josef, ruler of the racially fractured Austro-Hungarian Empire, but Franz Josef didn't approve of Sophie's comparatively lowly rank and allowed the marriage only on the condition that it be morganatic, that Sophie be given none of the rank or privileges of her husband, and that her children never stand in line to inherit the Imperial throne. Franz Ferdinand agreed enthusiastically, almost heedless of the insult in his eagerness to marry the woman he loved.But the realities of that morganatic condition began to impose themselves right away, and they were onerous. Sophie couldn't enter state occasions by her husband's side: she was forced to enter dead last, after every third-rank duchess on the guest list. She couldn't sit with her husband at state dinners (she was at the end of the table, two tennis courts away); she couldn't sit with him in the Imperial box at the theater or the opera; in the glittering whirl of the Viennese social season, she was virtually invisible. The couple's three children - Sophie, Max, and Ernst - grew up in a weird nether-world of quasi-royal privilege. Despite the Emperor's strictures, there were distinct warming signs from Vienna as the marriage prospered, but in 1914 the strictures were still very much in place.This was part of the allure of Sarajevo that summer. Franz Ferdinand was Inspector General of the army, and he went to Sarajevo in order to supervise Habsburg army troop maneuvers, but the visit had the added attraction of a technicality: whenever she was appearing beside her husband at a purely military function, Duchess Sophie was accorded full royal honors, and that naturally appealed to her besotted husband. On Sunday, June 28, 1914, as they rode in a little procession of cars to the Sarajevo Town Hall, the couple had the rare pleasure of being able to sit side-by-side in public.It was a beautiful day, hot but clear. There were cheering crowds. At the Archduke's own request, there was no jack-booted Habsburg police cordon. Franz Ferdinand may have been a slab-faced boor and a temperamental autocrat, but he was also a thinker. He knew exactly the trouble facing the Empire he was about to inherit - trouble especially from Serbian nationalists urged on by neighboring Belgrade - and he had some interesting plans to meet that trouble. As our authors rightly maintain:

By heritage and inclination, Franz Ferdinand was no liberal, but he was smart enough to embrace the ideas of political modernization to save the archaic and crumbling empire. If anyone could save the archaic Austro-Hungarian empire, his supporters believed, it was the archduke.

As R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton put it in their masterful A History of the Modern World:

.... Ferdinand, who would soon have become emperor, was known to favor some kind of transformation of Austria-Hungary, in which a more equal place might be given to the Slavs; but the reformer who makes a system work is the most dangerous of all enemies to the implacable revolutionary …

Palmer and Colton invoke implacable revolutionaries, but King and Woolmans see enemies even closer to home:

There have long been whispers that something more nefarious was afoot, a plot engineered by officials in Austria-Hungary who wanted the troublesome archduke and his equally troublesome morganatic wife out of the way. Without doubt there were those who trembled when they thought of Franz Ferdinand as emperor. His plans to reorganize the empire threatened conservative notions, and many worried that despite his renunciation, the archduke would find a way to crown his morganatic wife empress and name his eldest son as heir to the throne.

(In case that excerpt has started you counting, here's the final tally: the term "morganatic wife" occurs precisely 16,138 times in The Assassination of the Archduke.)

Franz Ferdinand was sympathetic to the Empire's large population of south Slavs; he was pragmatic enough to realize that the series of Serbian Balkan crises that had rocked the region in the last decade would be mere preludes to a great conflagration if moderating, conciliating steps weren't taken. He was reasonable, insightful, even compassionate. No wonder the Habsburgs were eager to disown him.The speech he intended to give on that sunny June day even contained some concluding remarks in Serbo-Croatian. Nefarious plots to one side, Sarajevo was a dangerous hotbed of anti-imperialism, and Franz Ferdinand knew it, so the day's cheering crowds must have lifted his spirits. You could almost directly transplant the last comment President Kennedy heard in Dallas fifty years later: "Well, Mr. Archduke, you cannot say the people of Sarajevo don't love you!"Then a bomb flew through the air, bounced off the Archduke's speeding car (any slower and the thing would have landed in Sophie's lap, where it had clearly been aimed), rolled under the following car, and exploded. The royals' driver instinctively sped up, and when Franz Ferdinand stepped out of his car moments later at Town Hall, he was in a towering rage. "I come to Sarajevo and am greeted with bombs! It is outrageous!"The mayor and the gathered officials cowered, but Sophie calmed her husband, and he gave his speech (the pages, hastily passed to him from another car, were spattered with blood), including the conciliatory final words.But there were men in Sarajevo who would not be consoled: eight members of the radical nationalist group Young Bosnia had been smuggled into the capital from neighboring Serbia, provided with guns, bombs, and cyanide capsules by the terrorist Black Hand, and stationed along the Imperial procession route with the intent of assassinating the heir to the Habsburg throne.The first of them quailed and did nothing. The second threw a bomb that missed (he then jumped to his death in the river, but it was only knee-deep; he then swallowed his cyanide capsule, but it only made him vomit; he eventually managed to die of tuberculosis, in jail, in 1916). The rest did nothing, and the Archduke and Sophie wanted to go to a nearby hospital to visit the members of their entourage hurt by the bomb blast. A changed route was proposed to whisk the Imperial couple to the hospital, but the drivers of the procession's cars weren't informed of the change. Minutes later, an official noticed and yelled, "What is this! This is the wrong way!" The cars came to a halt in order to change direction.The Archduke's car stopped five feet in front of Gavrilo Princip, the last and most fervent of the Young Bosnia plotters that day. He stepped forward, pointed his pistol, and fired point blank.His first shot hit Sophie in the abdomen. His second shot hit Franz Ferdinand in the neck. The crowd attacked Princip immediately, and after a moment the cars sped away. Seeing blood in her husband's mouth, Sophie asked him what in Heaven's name was wrong with him, then she collapsed and died. Franz Ferdinand urged her to live for the sake of their children, but blood was gushing out of his mouth from his severed jugular, and he died moments later. In their bravura chapter "St. Vitus's Day," King and Woolmans describe the whole fast tragedy in marvelously-controlled detail. No better account has ever been written in English.As is by now well known, this provincial assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne set in motion a horrifying lock-step of events that led to the First World War. The first of these events was the Austrian response to the Archduke's death. In a note which historian Robert Massie describes as "intended not as a basis for negotiations, but as a prelude to war," the Empire demanded that all anti-Austrian newspapers in Serbia be shut down, that all anti-Austrian propaganda in Serbian schools be discontinued and the teachers who taught it dismissed, and that Austrian officials be stationed in Belgrade to oversee these and other conditions. It was, as one British official pointed out, the kind of note a victor sends to a conquered opponent. There was no chance Serbia would agree, although King and Woolmans are somewhat naively emphatic that the famous Note was not unfair:

Serbia had harbored terrorist groups and allowed anti-Austrian propaganda in its schools and newspapers. Its military and intelligence had armed and trained the terrorists; its officials had helped the terrorists to cross into Bosnia; and members of its government, including the prime minister, had known of the plot in advance … Serbia could have prevented the assassination, but it had allowed the conspirators to succeed by giving Vienna only a feeble and deliberately ambiguous warning about possible danger in Sarajevo.

Instead of agreeing to Austria's conditions, Serbia looked to her allies, and thus so did Austria, and so Europe overnight polarized into armed camps, and so England honored its treaty obligations to France and entered the war, and so eventually did the United States, and so a generation died. Three of the terrorists had been too young on the day of the attack to be executed, but all three were dying of tuberculosis anyway. They spent the rest of their days in Theresienstadt Prison in Bohemia. They never lived to see the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire they hated, but they didn't miss its demise by much.King and Woolmans aren't mainly concerned with that Empire, or with the war that killed it along with so much else. Their main focus is on the love affair between Franz Ferdinand and his wife (whole chapters are devoted to the many slights they endured at the hands of petty Imperial courtiers). All of this ground has been covered many times before, of course, although seldom with such sympathy. And although The Assassination of the Archduke is extremely good reading, that one starts to worry after a while. As one hagiographic detail after another piles up, the reader can rightfully wonder just what our authors had to do in order to earn that opening thumbs-up from Her Serene Highness.Take the aftermath of the war, when there starts to be trouble about the aforementioned family castle of Konopischt:

At first there were petty annoyances at the hands of Prague's administrator, but soon locals invaded the park [at Konopischt], wandering through the gardens, waving the new Czech flag beneath the castle windows, and generally making life unpleasant.

Two sources are listed for that account: Lucien Meysels, author of Die verhinderte Dynastie: Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand und das Haus Hohenberg - and Princess Sophie. No specific attributions are made for either one, but is the German historian or Her Serene Highness more likely to have come out with that comment about the lower orders "generally making life unpleasant"?When it comes to the Archduke’s own character, things are no better. A typical paragraph can do stand-in duty for them all:

Duke Georg of Hohenberg recalls how his grandfather was usually and conflictingly described as both a bigot and a visionary, "a sinister autocrat," "a warmonger," and a man of peace all at the same time. The archduke's fight for Sophie, he says, "turned him into a suspicious observer of human unreliability and vanity." He persevered until victorious, and together with Sophie endured "insults, animosity, and intrigues," but one constant remained: the devotion shared by Franz Ferdinand and Sophie to each other and to their children.

Duke Georg was born in 1929. He could no more "recall" anything about his grandfather than you could - what the passage means to say (all it can possibly mean to say) is that Duke Georg recalls reading about how his grandfather was usually described, and what is a reader supposed to make of that? What sources did Duke Georg read about his grandfather? We're not told. What attitude did Duke Georg bring to those readings? We're not told, although it's not too terribly tough to guess.And Duke Georg is only the first half of the paragraph! The second half, that bit about the "one constant" being the devotion Franz Ferdinand and Sophie shared? It's attributed to Her Serene Highness Princess Anita of Hohenberg, HSH Sophie's sister, who was born in 1958, has no historical training to speak of, and is perhaps just a smidge biased. Time and again in The Assassination of the Archduke, King and Woolmans refer to this sort of court-in-exile gossip using just the phrase they use here: "Information from HSH Princess Anita of Hohenberg to authors." But gossip isn't "information," or Perez Hilton would be Editor-in-Chief of the Wall Street Journal. Gossip has no place in a work of history, regardless of who wrote that work's attention-grabbing Foreward. And yet:

Franz Ferdinand's son Maximillian Karl Franz Michael Hubert Anton Ignatius Josef Maria, born in 1902, had "a Habsburg godfather, Franz Ferdinand's uncle Archduke Karle Stephan."

Source? "Information from HSH Prince Albrecht of Hohenberg to authors."The pattern of "massive, administrative pettiness" directed against the dead couple? Source? "Information from HSH Princess Sophie of Hohenberg to the authors."The unnerved Duchess Sophie temporarily sought solace in a convent in 1899? Source? "Information from HSH Princess Anita of Hohenberg to the authors."Most of the dead couple's servants remained loyal and stayed with the children until their death? Source? Princess Anita again, that chatterbox. And so on throughout the book.Things are sometimes scarcely better outside the drawing room. For instance, there's the question of why Franz Ferdinand went to Sarajevo in the first place. Hew Strachan in his book The First World War writes:

By [24 June 1914] the archduke was en route to Bosnia, where he was due to attend the manoeuvres of the 15th and 16th Army Corps.John Keegan in his book The First World War writes:The Habsburg army's summer manoeuvres of 1914 were held in Bosnia, the former Ottoman Turkish province occupied by Austria in 1878 and annexed to the empire in 1908. Franz Ferdinand, nephew to the Emperor Franz Josef and Inspector General of the army, arrived in Bosnia on 25 June to supervise.

S. L. A. Marshall in his book World War I writes:

Two corps of the Austrian Army, regularly stationed in Bosnia, were holding their annual maneuvers next to the border with Serbia, Austria's tiny neighbor. The Archduke was the Inspector General of the Army and it was his duty to go.

King and Woolmans write:

Many historians have assumed that Franz Ferdinand's recent elevation to inspector general of the armed forced demanded his attendance at the Bosnian maneuvers ... In fact, though, Franz Ferdinand went to Bosnia only as an observer. He did not attend the maneuvers as inspector general and had no official role in the exercises.

Their source this time around? You'll be relieved to know it's not a Serene Princess - but you won't be much relieved: "Information from Professor Wladimir Aichelburg to authors." Not any of the five books about Franz Ferdinand that Professor Aichelburg has written in the last decade - either he never wrote that little detail in any of those books, or King and Woolmans preferred gnoshing with him to reading him. Either way, I've never met Professor Aichelburg. Have you?"Today it is easy to look back upon the years before 1914 with a kind of gauzy, romantic nostalgia," our authors tell us at one point, going on to elaborate the dangers:

The problem has always been bias, as authors projected onto Franz Ferdinand, Sophie, and the terrorists who killed them their own conceits and nationalistic views.

A book calling the marriage of Franz Ferdinand and Countess Sophie "a modern fairy tale" - and written under the watchful eyes of a clutch of ersatz almost-Habsburgs - has much indeed to teach readers about the problems of bias, although in some well-landscaped corner of Valhalla, we can imagine Franzi and Sopherl nodding and saying "It's about time we got our due!" Honestly, is that all these people think about?____Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books forThe Washington Post, The National, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Historical Novel Review Online, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly, and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.