“He already had at that time a liking for solitude and a certain timidity with people,” according to Zur Mühlen, “and he was finally driven to live all alone in an old castle in the country,” where he died in 1917. He had been promised the post of ambassador to Washington, she recounts, and “he would have been eminently fitted for this appointment: not only had he spent part of his schooldays in the United States, he had democratic sympathies, a realistic outlook and a grasp of world politics which must have been almost unique among Austrian career diplomats.” For instance, “his dispatches from Tokyo had been such that when the Russo-Japanese war broke out and an astonished world realized that the country of geishas and cherry-blossom had produced a nation to be reckoned with from a military point of view, it was murmured on the Ballhausplatz that ‘Wydenbrook had been right after all,’ though previously everyone had made fun of his alarmist reports.”Ĥ On his return from Madrid Onkel Anton found himself less and less at home in his native Austria. This was not his wish, however, nor is the judgment of his career a fair one, in the view of his daughter. (1865–1867) - a circumstance that resulted, in the view of his daughter, the writer Nora Wydenbruck, in his “democratic predilections” and “violent disapproval of Austrian society and its Byzantine class distinctions.” (See Chapter 6 below, “Remembering Hemynia Zur Mühlen.”) His diplomatic career, according to one modern scholar, was that of “a mediocrity who made little mark on his contemporaries.” After stints in a subaltern position in London, as ambassador to Japan from 1893 until 1899 (not, probably a much desired or prestigious posting at the time), and as head of the Austro-Hungarian legation first in Denmark (1899–1907), then in the Netherlands (1908–1911), his “comfortably mediocre career ended as ambassador in Spain” (1911–1913). A diplomat like his father and like Zur Mühlen’s own father, Christoph Anton “first went to school in America,” during the two years when Ferdinand von Wydenbruck was Emperor Franz Joseph’s Envoy Extraordinary in Washington, D.C. his brother-in-law), is Onkel Anton (Christoph Anton Maria), the eldest son of Ferdinand, Graf (Count) von Wydenbruck, and the latter’s wife - Zur Mühlen’s beloved grandmother Isabella Blacker. 2 Uncleģ The Uncle in question, who asks the provocative question about his niece’s father (i.e. Erinnerungen Ludwigs Freiherrn von Flotow, p. (Source: Edwin Marsch, ed., November 1918 auf dem Ballhausplatz. The fall-out from the affair did not enhance Deym’s reputation as a diplomat, however, since Lützow was soon writing and speaking out in England in favor of independence for the Czechs and in terms very unfavorable to the dual monarchy. Apparently it did not have a fatal outcome for either party. Deym refused point blank, probably in disrespectful terms, for Lützow immediately challenged him to a duel. To get his new wife accepted in good society, Lützow asked Deym if, as a favor, he would arrange for the ambassadress to introduce the lady in question at one of her receptions. Another diplomat, Franz, Graf Lützow, who had also served under Deym in London and had since retired from the service, had married a lady reputed to have once been the mistress of Prince Batthyány, a Hungarian residing in England, where he bred horses.
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