Otto and Franz Josef
We had very near and dear friends to lunch yesterday. He has Russian roots. She is half-American, half-Belgian. And both their families are far-flung and cosmopolitan. At one stage the conversation got onto historical connections. I told them about an article I had just read, co-authored by a young Hungarian working in my secretariat, Zoltan Krasznai. (‘The Christ of Limpias and the Passion of Hungary’, William A. Christian Jr. and Zoltan Krasznai, History and Anthropology, Vol. 20, N° 3, September 2009, pp. 219-242.) The article recounts the strange way in which the residence of the exiled Hungarian royal family in the Basque village of Lekeitio in the early 1920s sharpened the interest of Hungarian monarchists in the apparitions of the Christ of Limpias in nearby Cantabria. The monarchists interpreted the alleged movements of the Christ as sympathetic suffering for the dismemberment of the Hungarian nation by the Allied powers in the Treaty of Trianon; the Passion and Crucifixion of Hungary becoming the dominant nationalist metaphor in the interwar years (you can still find objets in Budapest bric-a-brac shops). Zita Bourbon-Palma, the Italian widow of Charles (crowned King of Hungary in 1916, died of pneumonia on Madeira, 1922) installed herself with her six children in a draughty villa in Lekeitio. One of those children was Otto von Hapsburg or, to give him his full name, Archduke Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius of Austria. I knew this Otto, this living link (and still living) with Charlemagne who, from 1979 to 1999, served as a Member of the European Parliament. By then he was a gentleman supporter of the European ideal and it was fascinating to read about this particular aspect of his childhood and to realise just how much history he had lived. The lunchtime topic now became monarchy/aristocrats who had known one life, lost everything and had to adapt to another. Immediately, the name of Vladimir Nabokov came up (see previous posts about Speak, Memory). Here, there was a Belgian connection, both with regard to his parents’ exile at one stage and to his brother Kirill Vladimirovich Nabokov, who studied at Leuven and later managed a travel agency in Brussels (he was also a poet and journalist). Oh, said our Belgian-American friend, I knew him very well. He and his wife were, it transpired, friends of her parents. She had even stayed at his flat as a kid. Beat that! Postscript (20 October): within minutes of me posting this entry a colleague wrote to inform me that she had commuted for three years with one of Kirill’s daughters and that they had become good friends…
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