Flag of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

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Flag of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

Otto Habsburg-Lothringen, the eldest son of the last emperor of Austria, died on Tuesday at his home in Germany, at the age of 98, his family said.

Archduke Otto von Habsburg lived in exile in south Germany, since 1954, and dedicated his life to creating a vision to overcome the Cold War, and to working to make it happen.

Otto von Habsburg

Otto von Habsburg was born in 1912, and became the head of the Imperial House of Austria ten years later, in 1922, when his father Charles died.

The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was abolished in 1919, at the end of the World War I, and the estates of the imperial house of Habsburg were seized by the state weeks before the family fled to Switzerland.

Otto von Habsburg lived in Portugal, Spain, Belgium, the United States, and France before his family settled in Bavaria, Germany.

He was for two decades a member of the Bavarian Parliament, and a lecturer all over the world on international affairs.

Otto von Habsburg renounce his claim to the throne of Austria in 1961, and was allowed to return to his country in 1966.

He was a critic of the Nazi regime and of the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich, and then voiced the suffering of the countries in Eastern Europe that belonged to his empire, and who were now under Communist rule.

Otto von Habsburg in the 1930s

In 1989, he set up the “Pan-European Picnic,” which was at the time a first breach of the Iron Curtain, at the border between Austria and Hungary, which was the line between the two worlds, capitalist and Communist.

He is remembered in Hungary and Austria as a personality who could, in the words of a Hungarian citizen, “have made a good king.”

He will be buried in the imperial crypt in Vienna, after a funeral on July 16 in St. Stefan’s Cathedral in Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn announced.

A spokesman for his family’s secretariat in Hungary announced that his heart would be buried in Pannonhalma Abbey, in western Hungary, according to a custom of the Habsburg family.

Former Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel called him “a great Austrian patriot,” and Jose Manuel Barosso called him “a great European, who gave impetus to the European project throughout his life.”

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