50 Fun Facts About Austria-Hungary

Which Austro-Hungarian submarine ace of World War I became the father portrayed in The Sound of Music?

Georg von Trapp was the most successful Austro-Hungarian submarine commander of the war. His first wife was the granddaughter of Robert Whitehead, inventor of the modern torpedo.

Which city, merged from three towns in 1873, opened mainland Europe's first electric underground in 1896?

Budapest built the Millennium Underground Railway, the world's second electrified underground after London's. The line under Andrássy Avenue has run ever since.

Which magician was born Erik Weisz in 1874 in the Hungarian capital of Austria-Hungary?

Harry Houdini left Hungary as a child when his family settled in Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father served as a rabbi.

Which engineer behind the Volkswagen Beetle was born in Austria-Hungary, in northern Bohemia, in 1875?

Ferdinand Porsche also created the first petrol-electric hybrid vehicle, the Lohner-Porsche, long before he designed racing cars for Auto Union.

Hungarian belongs to the Uralic language family; which other national language of Europe does too?

Finnish shares several hundred word roots with Hungarian: water is vesi in one and víz in the other, and hand is käsi and kéz.

Which ancient language stayed official in the Kingdom of Hungary until 1844, when Hungarian replaced it?

Latin had held official status in the Kingdom of Hungary since the 11th century, until Hungarian became the exclusive official language in 1844.

Which empress of Austria, nicknamed Sisi, was stabbed to death by an anarchist in Geneva in 1898?

Elisabeth was 60 and travelling incognito despite warnings of possible assassination attempts. She had been empress for 44 years.

In which city was Archduke Franz Ferdinand shot in June 1914, shortly after a bomb bounced off his car?

Sarajevo saw two attacks that morning: the bomb failed, and the archduke was killed after changing his plans to visit the wounded in hospital.

Which Bohemian city gave its name to the pale lager first brewed there in 1842 and housed the Škoda Works?

Pilsen hired a Bavarian brewer, Josef Groll, to make that first batch. Emil Škoda later gave his name to a machine works in the same city.

Which painter of The Kiss became president of the Vienna Secession when it formed in 1897?

Gustav Klimt and the group soon had their own exhibition hall, the Secession Building, designed by the architect Olbrich in 1897–98.

Which language was the sole language of command in Austria-Hungary's Common Army, whatever a regiment spoke?

German gave the orders, but each unit also had its own regimental languages, and every officer had three years to learn those of his men.

Which emperor ruled the Habsburg lands for almost 68 years, from the revolutions of 1848 until his death in 1916?

Franz Joseph I came to the throne at 18 when his uncle Ferdinand abdicated, and he died aged 86 in the third year of the First World War.

Which composer, known as the Waltz King, premiered The Blue Danube in Vienna in February 1867?

Johann Strauss II first wrote it as a song for a carnival choir. The orchestral version he made for that year's Paris World's Fair became the great success.

Defeat by which kingdom at Königgrätz in 1866 pushed Austria into its Compromise with Hungary a year later?

Prussia won decisively, ending Austria's role as leading state in the lands to its north and leaving the Habsburg Empire on the verge of collapse.

On which kingdom did Austria-Hungary declare war on 28 July 1914, a month after the shooting of its heir?

Serbia, by some historians' reading, had accepted every term of Vienna's ultimatum except letting Austro-Hungarian police operate on its soil.

Which city on the Danube, now a national capital, was known as Pressburg in Austria and Pozsony in Hungary?

Bratislava became the official name only in March 1919. As Pozsony, the city had seen eleven Hungarian kings crowned in its cathedral.

At which hunting lodge in the Vienna Woods was Crown Prince Rudolf found dead with his teenage mistress in 1889?

Mayerling cost the emperor his only son, so the succession passed to his brother's line and to the nephew who was shot in 1914.

Which eastern region of the Kingdom of Hungary, home to Saxons and Székelys, became part of Romania in 1920?

Transylvania was proclaimed united with Romania on 1 December 1918, the date Romania now celebrates as its national day.

Which heraldic emblem did the Austrian Empire keep as its arms after the Holy Roman Empire ended in 1806?

The double-headed eagle did not outlive the monarchy: republican Austria switched to a bird with a single head.

Which Austrian border town, where his father was a customs official, was the 1889 birthplace of Adolf Hitler?

Braunau am Inn was his home only until the age of three, and the house where he was born has since been turned into a police station.

Which crown land, taken from Poland in the 1772 partition, was the largest and most populous in the Austrian half?

Galicia was also the empire's poorest province, yet its own assembly, the Sejm, held wide powers over education, culture and local affairs.

Which river southeast of Vienna gave the two halves of Austria-Hungary their informal names?

Leitha is a right tributary of the Danube, and it marked only part of the boundary: some Austrian crown lands lay far to the north-east of Hungary.

Which Ottoman province did Austria-Hungary occupy in 1878 and formally annex in 1908, provoking a European crisis?

Bosnia and Herzegovina belonged to neither half of the Dual Monarchy. It was run as a shared holding under the joint finance ministry.

Which Adriatic city, Habsburg since 1382, was Austria's main trading port and the base of the Austrian Lloyd line?

Trieste grew into the fourth-largest city of Austria-Hungary, and by 1913 Austrian Lloyd ran a fleet of 62 ships.

Lemberg, capital of Austria's most populous crown land, is known today by which name?

Lviv grew from about 30,000 people at the Austrian annexation in 1772 to 196,000 by 1910, and Poles knew it as Lwów.

Which city, once known in Austria as Agram, was the seat of Croatia-Slavonia's parliament, the Sabor?

Zagreb was hit by a destructive earthquake in 1880, and the building boom that lasted until 1914 gave the town the layout it has today.

Laibach, the capital of the crown land of Carniola, is known today as which national capital?

Ljubljana was badly damaged by an earthquake in 1895 and rebuilt in the Vienna Secession style, which still stands beside its older Baroque buildings.

Which Alpine crown land of Austria-Hungary was split in 1919, when its southern part passed to Italy?

Tyrol kept its capital, Innsbruck, but the Treaty of Saint-Germain gave Italy the Alpine watershed at the Brenner Pass.

Which 19-year-old student shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 and was spared execution because of his age?

Gavrilo Princip was 27 days short of the twenty-year minimum for execution under Habsburg law, so he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Which 1920 treaty, signed in a palace at Versailles, left Hungary with 28% of its pre-war land?

Trianon also left Hungary landlocked, cut off from the sea port it had built up at Fiume on the Adriatic.

What name is given to the drive after 1867 to make the Kingdom of Hungary's minorities adopt the Hungarian language?

Magyarization peaked with a 1907 law that expected every primary pupil to read, write and count in Hungarian for the first four years of school.

The East Slavic people whom Habsburg officials called Ruthenians are known today mainly by which name?

Ukrainians was a name that spread late: Ruthenian became the official Austrian term in 1843, and only by 1900 were more and more of them using the newer name.

Which language did a 1908 conference in Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary, declare a national language of the Jewish people?

Yiddish was deemed 'a' national language, not 'the' one, after delegates argued the point. The meeting was organised by members of a club at the University of Vienna.

Count Badeni's 1897 ordinance gave which language equal standing in Bohemia's internal government, setting off a crisis?

Czech speakers were already the majority in Bohemia, but the nationalist backlash against the ordinance was so fierce that the Crown dismissed Badeni.

The northern part of the old Kingdom of Hungary, known as Upper Hungary, lies mostly in which modern country?

Slovakia had no legal status of its own within Hungary, though its people had called the region Slovensko since at least the 15th century.

Which script did a 1915 imperial order ban in Austria-Hungary's newest province, except within Orthodox church bodies?

Cyrillic had already been restricted to religious instruction in Croatia-Slavonia by orders of October 1914, in the first months of the war.

The abbreviation k. u. k., prefixed to Austria-Hungary's shared army, navy and ministries, stood for which phrase?

Imperial and royal kept its 'and' at Hungarian insistence: after 1867 a mere hyphen no longer suited the kingdom's new autonomous status.

Which currency replaced the gulden in 1892, when Austria-Hungary adopted the gold standard?

Krone banknotes had two faces: one side was printed in Hungarian, while the Austrian side also gave the currency's name in the empire's other languages.

Which city, a nominally independent Free City from 1815, was annexed by Austria in 1846 after a failed uprising?

Kraków entered the empire as a Grand Duchy, and Austrian soldiers turned Wawel hill, with its royal castle, into barracks.

In which city of Austria-Hungary was the writer Franz Kafka born in 1883, near the Old Town Square?

Prague was also where Kafka trained as a lawyer and worked for the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia.

Which westernmost crown land of old Austria voted by about 80% in 1919 to seek union with Switzerland?

Vorarlberg speaks an Alemannic dialect closer to Swiss speech than to the rest of Austria, but the union never came about and it is still an Austrian state.

Which Austrian state was created in 1921 from the western borderland of the old Kingdom of Hungary?

Burgenland was first going to be the Land of Four Castles; the number was dropped once it was clear that none of those castle towns would lie inside it.

Which crown land of Austria-Hungary, governed from Brünn, was the birthplace of Sigmund Freud in 1856?

Moravia was his home only briefly: the Freud family left the town of Freiberg and by 1860 had settled in Vienna.

Which eastern crown land, annexed from Moldavia in 1775, has a name that comes from the Slavic word for beech tree?

Bukovina was governed from Czernowitz and was made a separate crown land in 1849, after the 1848 revolutions.

Which crown land stretched down the Adriatic coast from the island of Rab to Budva, with its capital at Zara?

Dalmatia had been a possession of the Republic of Venice until 1797, and Zara remained its only city with an Italian-speaking majority.

Fiume, the Kingdom of Hungary's only international port and home of the first torpedo factory, is now which city?

Rijeka was governed directly from the Hungarian capital as a separate body, and by 1913–14 it was the tenth-busiest port in Europe.

Which harbour town at the tip of Istria was the main base of the Austro-Hungarian Navy in the First World War?

Pola had a large natural harbour that also made it a major shipbuilding centre, and the fleet spent much of the war at its moorings there.

Kolozsvár, where Hungary founded its second modern university in 1872, is known today by which Romanian name?

Cluj-Napoca lost that university after the First World War: it moved briefly to the Hungarian capital and then found a home in Szeged.

Which last commander of the Austro-Hungarian fleet went on to rule landlocked Hungary as regent from 1920 to 1944?

Miklós Horthy governed a kingdom without a king: its former monarch tried twice to return in 1921, and both attempts failed.

Which last Habsburg emperor, who took the throne in 1916, was beatified by the Catholic Church in 2004?

Charles I secretly sought peace with France in 1917 without success, and died in exile on the Portuguese island of Madeira aged only 34.