Fatal Omens

The European "war to end all wars" was a catastrophe decades in the making. The prophetic voices of alienated writers and artists in Central Europe were at the turn of the twentieth century divining the end of modernity while seeking cultural and spiritual renewal. Cracks in the optimistic liberal order of the European Age were coming apart and ceding to darker forces. Against this backdrop, historical novelist Stephen Almássy foregrounds the lives of Archduke Charles of Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia and Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma. Their marriage before the Great War culminates during the war when they become the last Emperor and Empress of Austria-Hungary under the Habsburg scepter. The old Central European dynasty, the last outpost in Europe of the imperium sacrum, falls on the day, November eleventh, 1918, when the war comes to an uncertain end.