Years in Exile
Otto's family spent the subsequent years in Switzerland, and on the Portuguese island of Madeira, where Charles died prematurely in 1922, leaving the 9-year-old Otto pretender to the throne. On his father's deathbed, his mother, then-Empress Dowager Zita, told the 9-year-old, "your father is now sleeping the eternal sleep—you are now Emperor and King". The family eventually relocated to the Basque town of Lekeitio, where 40 Spanish grandees bought them a villa. Meanwhile, the Austrian parliament had officially expelled the Habsburg dynasty and confiscated all the official property (Habsburg Law of 3 April 1919).
In 1935, he graduated with a PhD degree in Political and Social Sciences from the University of Louvain in Belgium. From his father's death throughout the remainder of his time in exile, Otto considered himself the rightful emperor of Austria and stated this on many occasions. In 1937 he wrote,
“I know very well that the overwhelming majority of the Austrian population would like me to assume the heritage of the peace emperor, my beloved father, rather earlier than later. (...) The people have never cast a vote in favor of the republic. They have remained silent as long as they were exhausted from the long fight, and taken by surprise by the audacity of the revolutionaries of 1918 and 1919. They shook off their resignation when they realized that the revolution had raped their right to life and freedom. (...) Such trust places a heavy burden on me. I accept it readily. God willing, the hour of reunion between the Duke and the people will arrive soon.”
He continued to enjoy considerable public support in Austria; from 1931 to 1938, 1,603 Austrian municipalities named Otto an honorary citizen.
Read more about this topic: Otto Von Habsburg
Famous quotes containing the words years in, years and/or exile:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“In ten thousand years the Sierras
Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion.”
—Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
“the bird in the poplar tree
dreaming, his head
tucked into
far-and-near exile under his wing ...”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)