Otto von Habsburg, 1912–2011

The world first caught a glimpse of Otto von Habsburg in 1916, when the 4-year-old appeared dressed in a fur-trimmed tunic at the 1916 funeral of his great-great-uncle, Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef. A month later, when his father, Karl, assumed the imperial throne, the young Crown Prince of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia wore ermine and velvet with a large white feather in his cap. The pomp didn’t last. Within two years, Austria-Hungary was defeated in World War I, and the empire was abolished. Yet to the end of his long life, Otto von Habsburg preferred to be addressed as “Your Imperial Highness.”

Otto von Habsburg was always “the embodied echo of a different world,” said Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. Born in a royal villa in Reichenau, Austria, he grew up in European exile. Habsburg offered to restore Austria’s throne in 1938 to stave off the country’s annexation by the Nazis, and would likely have been eliminated by Hitler had that bid succeeded. Instead he spent most of the war in the U.S. Only once he formally relinquished his royal claim, in 1961, was he allowed to set foot in Austria again; there he was known merely as Dr. Otto Habsburg-Lothringen, since the country had banned aristocratic titles. So he became a citizen of Germany, where he could style himself Archduke Otto and retain the aristocratic “von” before Habsburg.

Once the prospect of monarchy faded, Habsburg embraced the idea of uniting Europe within what would become the European Union. In 1979 he was elected member of the European Parliament for Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union. In his 20 years in the Parliament, Habsburg “proved an accomplished debater with a fluent command of seven European languages,” said the London Telegraph.

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He remained controversial for his archconservative politics and his conviction that Austrians had been Hitler’s victims rather than his accomplices, said the Associated Press. But Habsburg’s efforts to bridge the gap between eastern and western Europe gained him broad respect. His body will be buried in Vienna’s Emperor Tomb, and his heart in a Benedictine abbey in Hungary.