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WIEN 1910

It's said that Otto von Habsburg, hearing his colleagues from the European
Parliament discuss the Austria-Hungary soccer match, asked *against who?"
I too find it difficult somettnes to separate the Magyar land where Uncle
Anton had his roots from the Mitteleuropa of which he was such a perfect
representative: polyglot, multieultural, moving effortlessly from one literature
to the next, from one set of symbols and traditions to another, free from any
prejudice of race or class, the very image of the ideal European whom the
make-believe of the late twentieth century renders even more impossibly
distant. There, as in Russia at the turn of the century, Europe existed, restless
and full of memory, as different from what idiotic conquerors attempted in
its name as it is from the supermarket they're trying to pass off on us now.