Thunder at Twilight

A landmark history illuminating two crucial years in the life of the extraordinary city of Vienna—and in the life of the twentieth century.

With a New Afterword by the Author

“Affecting. . . . Thunder at Twilight touches us with the sense of a world quite suddenly changed.” —New York Times

It was during the carnival of 1913 that a young Joseph Stalin arrived in Vienna on a mission that would launch him into the upper echelon of Russian revolutionaries, and it was here that he first collided with Leon Trotsky. It was in Vienna that the failed artist Adolf Hitler kept daubing watercolors and spouting tirades at fellow drifters in a flophouse. Here Archduke Franz Ferdinand had a troubled audience with Emperor Franz Joseph—and soon the bullet that killed the Archduke would set off the Great War that would kill ten million more.

With luminous prose that has twice made him a finalist for the National Book Award, Frederic Morton evokes the opulent, elegant, incomparable sunset metropolis—Vienna on the brink of cataclysm.

Includes Photographs