Book Reading of Monika Czernin's "The Emperor Incognito - Joseph II's Journey through Enlightenment Europe"
Monika Czernin
The Emperor Incognito
Joseph II's Journey through Enlightenment Europe
This is a remarkable, indeed unique, piece of work. ‘The Emperor Incognito combines the historian’s fidelity to truth and sources, the literary quality and immediacy of a novelist, a journalist’s sharp eye for the telling detail, and a dramatist’s arrangement of speech, actors and scenery. It is simultaneously a biography of one of Europe’s most enigmatic monarchs, a study in leadership, and a panorama of Europe on the cusp of revolution and modernity.'
(from the Preface of Dominic Lieven, Fellow of the British Academy. Honorary and Emeritus Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge)
Monika Czernin will present her highly acclaimed book The Emperor Incognito and discuss with journalist and author Mario Herger why she thinks that Joseph II's Journey through Enlightenment Europe has to tell us lessons for today:
“Today, we are once again living in a time of crises. Societies are drifting apart and good governance is at stake. When elites distance themselves from the masses, when inequality grows, and when those who govern lose contact with the grassroots, things go wrong. The fact that an absolute monarch in the 18th century recognizes 'where the shoe pinches' is truly astonishing, and thus Joseph II can serve as a role model even today.”
The Book
It is the middle of the eighteenth century. Across Europe, the signs of crises are everywhere — yet only one ruler dares to take a closer look: Emperor Joseph II.
Travelling incognito, and without the customary pomp and entourage he sets out through the vast Holy Roman Empire and his Habsburg lands to see with his own eyes how his subjects live, suffer, and starve.
He moves between worlds. He debates with kings and queens, lives the Enlightenment ideas of his time, and walks unannounced into hospitals, factories, and peasant homes. When he visits his sister, the French Queen Marie Antoinette at Versailles in 1777, he senses the Revolution looming.
The Emperor Incognito is the story of an extraordinary man in an age of upheaval: a ruler who spent a quarter of his twenty-five-year reign not on his throne, but on the road. His efforts were titanic, his ambitions radical, his frustrations immense. "Here lies Joseph, who failed in everything he undertook”, was his self-written epitaph, and yet the modern Austrian monarchy was his achievement in a Europe in which progress was no longer determined solely by its rulers.
Monika Czernin (author) is an internationally renowned author and filmmaker. Her research focuses on key figures and turning points of European history, and her book, Anna Sacher and Her Hotel, spent many weeks on the bestseller lists in Germany. Czernin was awarded the Friedrich Schiedel Literature Prize in 2023 for The Emperor Incognito (German edition). She is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Mario Herger is an Austrian author and journalist living and working in Silicon Valley — widely recognized for his sharp-eyed writing on innovation, technology, and the future. Few observers combine his historical perspective with such immediate access to where that future is being made. That makes him a natural conversation partner for Monika's search for the lessons the past holds for the present.