Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Like the author's earlier A Nervous Splendour: Vienna 1888-1889 ( LJ 11/15/79), which focused on the suicide of the Hapsburg Crown Prince Rudolph, this social history of the same city focuses on the events and personalities surrounding the assassination of the last Crown Prince, Franz Ferdinand. A remarkable procession of influential persons waltzed through Vienna during the two winter social seasons; some were already famous in their fields (Freud), others would only later attain powerful positions (Hitler). Extensively based on personal memoirs and contemporary periodicals, the work is less scholarly than Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower ( LJ 12/1/65) but adds a flavor which she omitted. It belongs in larger collections.
- Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

From the author of A Nervous Splendor, a dazzling portrait of the epicenter of the apocalypse that was World War I. Thunder at Twilight is a landmark of historical vision, drawing on hitherto untapped sources to illuminate two crucial years in the life of the extraordinary city of Viennaand in the life of the twentieth century. It was during the carnival of 1913 that a young Stalin arrived on a mission that would launch him into the upper echelon of Russian revolutionaries, and it was here that he first collided with Trotsky. It was in Vienna that the failed artist Adolf Hitler kept daubing watercolors and spouting tirades at fellow drifters in a flophouse. Here Archduke Franz Ferdinand had a troubled audience with Emperor Franz Josephand soon the bullet that killed the archduke would set off the Great War that would kill ten million more. With luminous prose that has twice made him a finalist for the National Book Award, Frederic Morton evokes the opulent, elegant, incomparable sunset metropolisVienna on the brink of cataclysm.

From the author of A Nervous Splendor, a dazzling portrait of the epicenter of the apocalypse that was World War I. Thunder at Twilight is a landmark of historical vision, drawing on hitherto untapped sources to illuminate two crucial years in the life of the extraordinary city of Viennaand in the life of the twentieth century. It was during the carnival of 1913 that a young Stalin arrived on a mission that would launch him into the upper echelon of Russian revolutionaries, and it was here that he first collided with Trotsky. It was in Vienna that the failed artist Adolf Hitler kept daubing watercolors and spouting tirades at fellow drifters in a flophouse. Here Archduke Franz Ferdinand had a troubled audience with Emperor Franz Josephand soon the bullet that killed the archduke would set off the Great War that would kill ten million more. With luminous prose that has twice made him a finalist for the National Book Award, Frederic Morton evokes the opulent, elegant, incomparable sunset metropolisVienna on the brink of cataclysm.