In this era so deplorable for humanity which in our Austrian laboratory of the apocalypse is expressed by the grimace of gemütlich sickliness - in such an era the Archduke had the measure of a man. Only now, as Vienna mimics mourning, do we realize . . . how much he disdained that indispensable affability used by the powerful to promote their careers . . . He was no greeter. He had no winning ways to charm the people past their grievances. He did show character through his radical championship of the commonplace against a fake modernity. He proved himself by his taste. At his estate he opened to the people a floral landscape intelligible on the most popular level, a park with few rarefied pretensions . . . He was not part of the fancy dynamics of Austrian decay . . . he wanted to rouse our era from its sickness so that it would not sleep past its own death. Now it sleeps past his.
Karl Kraus