Going Native

"Wilhelm von Habsburg, the Red Prince, wore the uniform of an Austrian officer, the court regalia of a Habsburg archduke, the simple suit of a Parisian exile, the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece and, every so often, a dress. He could handle a saber, a pistol, a rudder or a golf club; he handled women by necessity and men for pleasure."

These two sentences, from the Prologue of Timothy Snyder's "The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke" and used in the book's promotional material, might lead one to expect the sort of biography commonly described as a "romp." But such an expectation would be misplaced. Snyder, a professor at Yale University, is a serious historian, and it is not his intention to titillate his readers.

Wilhelm von Habsburg ("saved from oblivion," notes the author, "by a few devoted Ukrainian historians and monarchists") represents a convenient peg on which Snyder hangs his real concerns and interests. These focus on the nature of nationality -- whether it must always be given or can be chosen -- and of perceptions of time. Specifically, Snyder is interested in how the Habsburg monarchy approached those issues and the extent to which that approach is mirrored in 21st-century solutions to the questions of nationhood that preoccupy the countries of the European Union and those who seek to join it.

The author gives each of his chapter headings a color -- Gold, Blue, Green, Red, Grey, White, Lilac, Brown, Black and Orange -- with each color relating to a particular phase of his protagonist's life or, at the end, to events after his death. "Blue" is subtitled "Childhood at Sea," "White" is attached to "Agent of Imperialism," and so on. No chapter is entitled "Purple," but in places the prose makes up for this omission. Here is Snyder getting quite carried away with his color scheme: "Wilhelm had lost the easy assurance that time was an eternity of royal blue -- or at least a green maturation to power, or a bloody red march to victory. He had learned to think instrumentally and had become an instrument. His only success was to strengthen the white politics of the moment, a European counterrevolution that was already turning brown at the edges."

The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke By Timothy Snyder Basic Books 336 pages. $27.95

Wilhelm was born in 1895. His father, Stefan, was a grandson of Archduke Karl von Habsburg, who defeated Napoleon at Aspern, and his mother was Archduchess Maria Theresia von Habsburg, a Tuscan princess. One of her grandfathers was Leopold II von Habsburg, the last Grand Duke of Tuscany, while the other was Ferdinand II of Bourbon. She was also the great-granddaughter of Stefan's grandfather Karl, thus her husband's first cousin once removed.

Stefan was preoccupied all his life with "the Polish question" -- that is, whether the three partitions of old Poland would ever be reunited and, if so, what form the united country would take. His solution, at least during Wilhelm's childhood and adolescence, was that Wilhelm, his youngest son, should be regent of a Poland that would be part of the Habsburg crownlands. But Wilhelm gave his heart to another country and decided to make of himself a Ukrainian.

During World War I, the young Wilhelm commanded a platoon within a predominantly Ukrainian regiment. His ambitions to be ruler of a Habsburg Ukraine seemed to take a step toward realization after the death of the Emperor Franz Josef in 1916, when the new Emperor, Karl, began to evince a particular interest in both Wilhelm and the Ukrainian national question. But by the end of 1918 ,the Habsburg monarchy had ceased to exist. On the day the German Kaiser signed the armistice bringing the war to a close, Karl withdrew from affairs of state and retired to a hunting lodge.

Wilhelm took refuge in a monastery -- but not for long, as perhaps his greatest strength was an ability to bend with the wind and adapt to changing circumstances. So when the Ukrainian National Republic was formed, he managed to get himself made chief of foreign relations for the Army. Two months later he resigned, dismayed by the accommodations Ukraine was making with Poland in a desperate attempt to resist Russia's Red and White Armies.

By the summer of 1920, Wilhelm was in Vienna, now permanently estranged from his father. He became involved in a deluded plot to invade Bolshevik Russia and at the end of 1922 was once more on the move, this time headed for Madrid. Here he attempted to become a businessman, getting involved in arms deals, but he had few talents in this direction, his only business assets, according to Snyder, being "his good looks, dress sense and last name."

In addition to his business interests, Wilhelm maintained unusual relations with a number of men. He needed both a father figure to replace the real father against whom he had rebelled and men of a lower social class to cater to his sexual desires. For some years his personal secretary and his valet fulfilled this latter requirement, but he was also a frequenter of Parisian male brothels. Despite these proclivities, Wilhelm was also able to seduce women just by looking at them. Well, some women, perhaps.

The opportunistic element in Wilhelm's character, allied to the cause of bringing about Ukrainian nationhood, led him to sympathize with the Nazis and even to join the German army at the start of World War II -- for at the time the "Nazis seemed like the only possible ally of Ukraine and the only force that might once again propel Wilhelm toward a throne." But then he switched sides when that particular calculation proved incorrect. The slaughter of 30,000 Kievan Jews at Baby Yar may have helped him realize that Nazi Germany was no friend of Ukraine, and he now went some way toward redeeming himself by engaging in anti-Nazi espionage.

After the war, he became once more the pragmatist, and made a virtue out of necessity: "Wilhelm, a man of royal birth and aspirations, decided to support the rule of the people. ... He endorsed the Austrian republic after a career as a monarchist, accepted the Austrian nation after a lifetime of believing in empire, and even joined the People's Party after years of bemoaning democracy as a front for Soviet conspiracy."

In the end, it was the Soviet Union that did for him. He was arrested as a spy in 1947 and finally made it to Kiev, "the city of his dreams, wearing a blindfold instead of a crown, borne to a dungeon rather than a throne." Sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment on Aug. 12, 1948, he died of tuberculosis six days later.

Despite the undeniably dramatic nature of Wilhelm's life, Snyder never succeeds in bringing him to life. This is largely because the details of that life are of secondary importance to the author, whose real hero is Ukraine. And one cannot help but admire that country and the dogged determination of its inhabitants, and to rejoice that it has at last attained the destiny the so-called Red Prince desired for it -- independent nationhood within a wider Europe.

Virginia Rounding is the author, most recently, of "Catherine the Great: Love, Sex, and Power."