Free Republic

For most of this century, the Hapsburg dynasty has been about as popular as a pork sandwich in a mosque among the intelligentsia. This fact has influenced a great many of the attitudes prevailing in our mass media and what passes for our education system. Thousands of Australians will possess vivid memories of a school textbook that dominated our history lessons: Cyrus Leo Sulzber's(1) Fall of eagles'. Mr Sulzberger, as the very phrase 'fall of eagles' suggests, disliked the Habsburgs even more than the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs, the other two objects of his wrath. The book is a hymn...

Back in the days of the Hapsburg Empire, there was a town in Bohemia called Budweis. The people in that town were called Budweisers and the town had a brewery which produced beer with the same name -- but different from the American Budweiser. Like many communities in Bohemia during that era, Budweis had people of both Czech and German ancestries, speaking different languages, though many were also bilingual. They got along pretty well and most people there thought of themselves as Budweisers, rather than as Czechs or Germans. But that would later change -- for the worse -- not...