Europe he had known survived him.

His wife, his titles—even his country—vanished in the red

madness of the time. The assassins had unhinged the world, which is the only reason we remember
their victim. The blunt truth is that he had been brutal and mulish— a Klotz. Yet every funeral has its
pathetic personal details, and among the petty but vexing problems raised by the archduke’s
unexpected demise was the issue of what his executors were to do with his hunting lodge near
Werfen, Austria. For four hundred years the lodge (really an immense villa), had been one of the
homes of the archbishops of Salzburg, who had commuted between there, their Renaissance
cathedral, their theological seminary east of Munich, and their two archepiscopal palaces on the
Salzach River. In the new, enlightened Europe, however, the ecclesiastical hierarchy had yielded to
royalty. The dull click of rosary beads had been replaced by the clean, sharp crack of sportsmen’s
rifles. Franz Ferdinand, whatever his other weaknesses, had been a superb shot. In the teeming
forests surrounding his lodge he had broken all slaughtering records. His trophies filled the halls.
Thus the sentimental Viennese felt that the new owner of Bluhnbach should know something about
guns. But the eighty-room chateau was expensive. Eventually their dilemma was solved brilliantly by
Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Hal-bach of Essen, Germany. Gustav Krupp was well acquainted with
guns. He was, in fact, the continent’s leading carmon manufacturer. The Krupps had been looking for
a new country home far from their weapons forges in the sooty, smelly Ruhr vaUey, so Gustav and
his family acquired the estate, with its superb view of the Austrian Alps, beneath one of whose peaks
the legendary twelfthcentury Emperor Frederick Barbarossa is said to lie asleep in a cave, ready to
spring to Germany’s aid whenever the black ravens circling overhead warn him that the sacred soil
of his First Reich is