I actually remember my great-uncle the Archduke Ferdinand, even though I was only 2 when the Serb nationalist Princip assassinated him. The assassination didn’t change things for me as a child or for our family, not in our daily life, because after all when you’re part of a family that has been in politics for 600 years, assassinations are just a professional hazard, part of the job. But of course they meant that my father became emperor in the middle of the war, in 1916. My father had already decided before he became emperor that they had to try everything to stop the war, because as a leader who went out with the soldiers on the front lines, he knew how horrible war was. If he had been successful, there would have been 1 million more soldiers alive.
When you see the factors that drove these nations into war, there was first one factor that one should not forget: people had no longer an experience of war–that is why there was this enormous enthusiasm on all sides as the war broke out in 1914. There had been nearly a hundred years without any major wars; even the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 was a localized war. My mother told me that Emperor Franz Joseph, after he was cheered so much by the crowds in Vienna when he declared war, said he had a tragic feeling. “I know what this means, and I know this will end badly,” he said.
