Austria & Hungary

An essential new history of Central Europe, the contested lands so often at the heart of world history  Central Europe has long been infamous as a region beset by war, a place where empires clashed and world wars began. In The Middle Kingdoms, Martyn Rady offers the definitive history of the...

The vibrant, sprawling saga of Empress Maria Theresa—one of the most renowned women rulers in history—and three of her extraordinary daughters, including Marie Antoinette, the doomed queen of France. Out of the thrilling and tempestuous eighteenth century comes the sweeping family saga of...

From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War "The Good War."But before it even...

In 1683, an Ottoman army that stretched from horizon to horizon set out to seize the "Golden Apple," as Turks referred to Vienna. The ensuing siege pitted battle-hardened Janissaries wielding seventeenth-century grenades against Habsburg armies, widely feared for their savagery. The walls of...

German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically German way of war. Peter Wilson challenges this narrative....

From a bestselling historian, a daringly revisionist history of World War I The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German...

December 1944. Soviet and German troops fight from house to house in the shattered, corpse-strewn suburbs of Budapest. Crazed Hungarian fascists join with die-hard Nazis to slaughter Jews day and night, turning the Danube blood-red. In less than six months, thirty-eight-year-old SS Colonel Adolf...

"The Last Days of Budapest is a masterpiece. Immaculately researched, it is packed with large-than-life characters and revelations about the unknown espionage history of the Second World War…. This is history as it should be written: utterly engrossing." -Malcolm Brabant, author of the New...

From the end of the Middle Ages to the First World War, Europe was dominated by one family: the Habsburgs. Their unprecedented rule is the focus of Simon Winder's vivid third book, Danubia. Thrillingly informative, Danubia is a treat that listeners will be eager to dip into....

The Bridge at Andau is James A. Michener at his most gripping. His classic nonfiction account of a doomed uprising is as searing and unforgettable as any of his bestselling novels. For five brief, glorious days in the autumn of 1956, the Hungarian revolution gave its people a glimpse at a...

AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A vivid and enthralling account of the historical and cultural events that defined Budapest, a unique city in the heart of Europe, on the fault line between East and West—from the critically acclaimed author of Lenin “A compelling portrait of one of...

In a panoramic and pioneering reappraisal, Pieter M. Judson shows why the Habsburg Empire mattered so much, for so long, to millions of Central Europeans....

Wolfram Siemann paints a fundamentally new image of the man who shaped Europe for over four decades. He reveals Metternich as more modern and his career much more forward-looking than we have ever recognized....

The life of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement?

The definitive history of Austria’s multinational army and its immense role during three centuries of European military history....

A new biography of Alma Mahler (1879-1964), revealing a woman determined to wield power in a world that denied her agency History has long vilified Alma Mahler. Critics accused her of distracting Gustav Mahler from his work, and her passionate love affairs shocked her peers. Drawing on Alma's...

Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, over 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported, and most were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The sole exception were the Jews in Budapest. This is the story of how one Jewish boy and 400 others were protected in a "yellow star house"....

Thunder at Twilight is a landmark historical vision, drawing on hitherto untapped sources to illuminate two crucial years in the life of the extraordinary city of Vienna—and in the life of the twentieth century. It was during the carnival of 1913 that a young Stalin arrived in Vienna on a...

The Habsburg family ruled central Europe since the early medieval times to World War I, but they still exist as one of the most prestigious Austrian families. To keep themselves in such high positions, the Habsburgs had to develop unique strategies to fight their political enemies....

This is the concluding volume of the history of the IV SS-Panzerkorps, a relatively unknown organization that was born in battle during the last year of the war and fought exclusively on the Eastern Front....

The iconic image of Beethoven is of him as a lone genius: hair wild, fists clenched, and brow furrowed. Beethoven may well have shaped the music of the future, but he was also a product of his time, influenced by the people, politics, and culture around him....

In Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, Victor Sebestyen vividly recreates not only the days of the uprising but the events, meetings and days that led up to it....

A distinguished professor debunks the assertion that America's Founders were deists who desired the strict separation of church and state and instead shows that their political ideas were profoundly influenced by their Christian convictions. In 2010, David Mark Hall gave a lecture at the...

Drawing on unpublished letters and rare primary sources, King and Woolmans tell the true story behind the tragic romance and brutal assassination that sparked World War I....

As he rose to power, Hitler's hatred toward the Habsburgs and their diverse empire fixated on Franz Ferdinand's sons, who became outspoken critics of the Nazi party and its racist ideology. When Germany seized Austria in 1938, they were the first two Austrians arrested by the Gestapo....