I love extraordinary stories that bring history to life. A couple of years ago, I shared the extraordinary fact that a 19th century American president had a grandchild still alive in 2024. (John Tyler was president of the United States from 1841 to 1845. His grandson Harrison Ruffin Tyler died in May 2025 aged 96.)

Recently, I’ve discovered the remarkable role the heir to the Habsburg empire played in ending the Cold War, 71 years after that empire was dissolved at the end of the first world war in 1918.

Archduke Otto von Habsburg became crown prince and heir to the throne in 1916 when his father became emperor (and king of Hungary) on the death of Emperor Franz Joseph I. When the new emperor, Otto’s father Charles, died in exile in 1922 Otto’s mother told her nine year son ‘your father is now sleeping the eternal sleep — you are now emperor and king.’

In the 1930s, Otto refused to meet Adolf Hitler, hoping in vain that the Austrian republic’s chancellor Schuschnigg would restore the Habsburg empire to counter the possibility of Anschluss: the union of Austria with Nazi Germany. In the 1960s he finally renounced his claim to the throne so he would be allowed to enter Austria. In 1979, this would-be emperor was elected to the European parliament representing the German Christian Social Union party. He strongly supported the concept of European political union, seeing the European Union’s eastern expansion as a modern version of the old Habsburg empire, He lived long enough to see Austria and Hungary united again in the EU, along with other former Habsbury territories.

As the 1980s drew to a close, Otto longed to see an end to Europe’s 44 year division. Austria itself had only become independent in 1955, despite its history as the first victim of Nazi aggression. Now, at last, the man who might have become emperor in 1922 played a key role in destroying the Iron Curtain that kept Austria and Hungary apart. As Guardian writer Shaun Walker put it, ‘when the end finally came for the iron curtain, it was not bulldozers or hammers that struck one of the first decisive blows, but a picnic.’ This was the Pan-European Picnic on 19 August 1989 that Otto, president of the Paneuropean Union, organised on the border of Austria and Hungary. He and Hungarian minister Imre Pozsgay wanted to test Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reaction to a breach in the Iron Curtain. This was the biggest mass exodus since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. Unlike Khruschev in 1956 and Brezhnev in 1968, Gorbachev didn’t crush this bid for freedom. Within weeks Hungary’s borders with the west were opened, and the Berlin Wall itself fell less than two months after the picnic.

The picnic was one of the first signs that Europe would soon be united again, and countries that had been under Soviet occupation since 1945 free to elect their own governments. As Erich Honecker, the dictator of East Germany, reflected bitterly later, ‘this Habsburg drove the nail into my coffin’. How extraordinary that a man who was once destined to rule as emperor would set Europe on the road to freedom over seven decades later.

Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xaver Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius – to use his fuill name – died in July 2011 aged 98, the last crown prince of Austria-Hungary.