Habsburg in 1918 - a torn family # 2023

The Habsburgs who stayed here

In March 1919 an imperial court procession stopped on Austrian soil for the last time. It was at the Feldkirch train station where Emperor Karl, in his Feldkirch Manifesto, revoked the declaration of renunciation that had been forced from him and promised to return. A short time later, the emperor and his family left the territory of the fallen empire and began his Swiss exile. After 640 years, the Habsburgs were no longer rulers of Austria.

But not all members of the imperial family left the country; some were unable to do so or did not want to. Archduchess Marie Valerie, youngest daughter of Emperor Franz Joseph, now a mother of many herself, sat at her children's sickbed at Wallsee Castle in Lower Austria. The rampant Spanish flu did not stop at the Habsburgs; Marie Valerie herself would also be affected by it. She and her family remained in Austria and made a declaration in accordance with Habsburg law. They tried to find an arrangement with the new republic and soon found themselves caught between two chairs. Seen as traitors by the convinced monarchists, and simultaneously they were viewed with suspicion by the young republic.

The Hohenbergs, the orphaned children of Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife Sophie, whose death in Sarajevo triggered the end of the old world, were also teenagers when the monarchy fell in 1918. Too young to be able to manage their parents' inheritance themselves, they had to leave Konopist Castle, the place of their childhood, as teenagers and thus found involuntary refuge in the small new republic of Austria.

The history of the Habsburgs who stayed here was a difficult one. A few managed to preserve the family fortune, but others, who had been used to a carefree life until the end of the monarchy, financed by appanagements from the imperial family fund, were now left with nothing and had to undergo a transformation from the “Imperial Highness” to live with the minimum pension allowance.