• The Red Prince

  • The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke
  • By: Timothy Snyder
  • Narrated by: Michael Damon
  • Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (83 ratings)

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The Red Prince  By  cover art

The Red Prince

By: Timothy Snyder
Narrated by: Michael Damon
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Publisher's summary

From the palaces of the Habsburg Empire to the torture chambers of Stalin's Soviet Union, the extraordinary story of a life suspended between the collapse of the imperial order and the violent emergence of modern Europe.

Wilhelm Von Habsburg wore the uniform of the 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. He spoke the Italian of his archduchess mother, the German of his archduke father, the English of his British royal friends, the Polish of the country his father wished to rule, and the Ukrainian of the land Wilhelm wished to rule himself.

In this exhilarating narrative history, prize-winning historian Timothy D. Snyder offers an indelible portrait of an aristocrat whose life personifies the wrenching upheavals of the first half of the 20th century, as the rule of empire gave way to the new politics of nationalism. Coming of age during the First World War, Wilhelm repudiated his family to fight alongside Ukrainian peasants in hopes that he would become their king. When this dream collapsed, he became, by turns, an ally of German imperialists, a notorious French lover, an angry Austrian monarchist, a calm opponent of Hitler, and a British spy against Stalin.

Played out in Europe's glittering capitals and bloody battlefields, in extravagant ski resorts and dank prison cells, The Red Prince captures an extraordinary moment in the history of Europe, in which the old order of the past was giving way to an undefined future - and in which everything, including identity itself, seemed up for grabs.

©2008 Timothy Snyder (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"[A]n interesting biography of a man whose colorful life embodied many of the tensions that plagued Europe in the early 20th century." ( Publishers Weekly)

What listeners say about The Red Prince

Average customer ratings
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  • 4 out of 5 stars
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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

little known story about Hapsburgs

Interesting material, but rendered difficult to listen to because of the strange pronunciation of most names, etc., by the reader. Good book but very poorly read.

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13 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Very Interesting

But man, the reader was a y a w n

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11 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Illuminating an obscure corner of 20th C. History

Great narrative covering a little-known corner of 20th Century European History. The narrator, however, is clearly more at home with French pronunciation than with any of the Slavic languages (a problem, given the subject matter). Most distressing was the insertion of a bogus "l" in "Czech(l)oslovakia."

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9 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Read the text; terrible narration.

Timothy Snyder is one of our finest historians, and The Red Prince is a fascinating look at the history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th Century as seen through the life of an errant strand of the Habsburg family. Unfortunately this audio performance is subpar. No disrespect to the narrator, who may be a fine actor, but he was not well prepared for narrating this text. His pronunciation of European places and names is often very far from the mark. Worse, the scanning of sentences is monotonous. Until I tried to listen to this book I underestimated how important the good readings are. Every sentence is read as if it is an episode in a fairy tale, which is contrived and distracting in and of itself, but this is often compounded by working to render a different connotation to the meaning of the sentence.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Untold story


The story was great, a very untold story of how politics stole a family legacy.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

One more piece to the puzzle of understanding a complex world.

You can’t understand World War II without understanding World War I and you can’t understand World War I without knowing something about the Habsburg dynasty

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

narrator needs to learn to pronounce city names

good book, author cared too much about good looking men. really interesting view on formation of initial identities

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

An engaging immersion in history

Thoroughly enjoyable, immersive, this would make a great basis for a movie or miniseries. Unfortunately, the reader's intonation does not do it justice. Almost sounds as if he is reading it for the first time

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Brilliant and complex story

I’ve been a student of history (2 masters degrees and a BA) and did not know this story. Learning this perspective on where we are today through the younger Hapsburg’s eyes is both full of romance and political context that opens my eyes to things that made what I thought I knew much clearer. It does need a better reader, though. This guy puts sing/song and monotony together. It takes real persistence to get through listening.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

An illuminating story of the 20th century in one life

Timothy Snyder is America’s foremost historian of Eastern Europe. This book focuses on a single man and his story, illuminating the grand sweep of Eastern European history in the process. My only real quibble with this book is the awful narrator. He sounds wooden and stilted, and his pronunciation of non-English names is atrocious. I counted three different pronunciations of Skoropadsky, none of them correct. It didn’t ruin the book but it was frustrating.

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