A charmingly personal history of Hapsburg Europe, as lively as it is informative, by the author of Germania From the end of the Middle Ages to the First World War, Europe was dominated by one family: the Habsburgs. Their unprecedented rule is the focus of Simon Winder’s vivid third book, Danubia. Winder’s approach is friendly, witty, personal; this is a narrative that, while erudite and well researched, prefers to be discursive and anecdotal. Beginning his travels in Hungary, Winder winds his way to the town of Brixen in a German-speaking region of Italy and visits a museum whose modest claim to fame is its elaborate sequence of crib scenes. He reflects on the tiresome tradition which dictated that Charles the Bold’s daughter would be known as “Mary the Rich”; meditates on the striking number of characters in the nostalgic post-1918 novels set in Habsburg Hungary who are casually armed with guns; and marvels at the Guinea Pig Village at the Budapest Zoo, “a work of extreme satirical savagery” that features a European town inhabited by guinea pigs. In his survey of the centuries of often incompetent Hapsburg rule that have continued to shape the fate of Central Europe, Winder does not shy away from the horrors, railing against the effects of nationalism, recounting the violence that was often part of life. But this is a history dominated above all by Winder’s energy and curiosity. Eminently readable and thrillingly informative, Danubia is a treat that readers will be eager to dip into.
