Karel Schwarzenberg, a Czech prince who twice served as his nation’s international minister, performed a key function in the Velvet Revolution and quietly subverted aristocratic expectations, died shortly after midnight on Nov. 12 in a Vienna hospital. He was 85.
His dying was confirmed by the Czech International Ministry and by his daughter, Lila.
As international minister from 2007 to 2009 and from 2010 to 2013, Mr. Schwarzenberg was a dedicated Atlanticist and European, who opposed Russian imperial ambitions. Earlier than his posts in authorities, as a supporter of his nation’s dissidents towards the then-Communist regime, he devoted an ancestral fortress in Germany and his personal cash to the trigger. He later grew to become chancellor beneath his buddy Vaclav Havel when the latter was elected president.
Nevertheless it was the pipe-smoking, mustachioed Mr. Schwarzenberg’s understated revolt towards his aristocratic heritage, one of many grandest in Europe, that captivated and endeared him to the Czech public, main him to run for the presidency in 2013. His official marketing campaign poster was punk-inspired and confirmed him sporting a pink mohawk.
His full identify and title was Karel Johannes Nepomuk Joseph Norbert Friedrich Antonius Wratislaw Mena Fürst zu Schwarzenberg, and his lineage, going again to the fifteenth century and even earlier than, included barons, counts, princes and area marshals, and not less than one cardinal and bishop.
For hundreds of years their holdings included resplendent castles throughout Bohemia, Austria and Germany, together with the Palais Schwarzenberg in Vienna. Some are nonetheless within the household. “Metternich’s reward within the 18th century,” Mr. Schwarzenberg mentioned to his daughter, Lila Schwarzenberg, in a protracted corridor of rifles on the ancestral fortress of Orlik, in a poignant 2022 movie she made about him. “And that, that was a present from Napoleon,” he mentioned casually.
On the age of 75 although, when the Czech artist David Cerny instructed utilizing a Intercourse Pistols album cowl as a mannequin in Mr. Schwarzenberg’s presidential marketing campaign, the prince turned politician jumped. “Sure, it’s incredible,” he mentioned. “Intercourse Pistols, I like it,” Mr. Cerny recalled in a telephone interview from Prague. “He was tremendous aristocratic, however he was fairly, fairly punk,” the artist recalled.
He spoke the archaic Czech of his ancestors and wore a T-shirt paying tribute to the trendy underground poet Ivan “Magor” Jirous. Czech critics known as him a dilettante, however polls confirmed he had excessive public belief and was thought-about above pervasive political corruption. Mr. Schwarzenberg turned his behavior of dozing off throughout politicians’ speeches to his benefit; a marketing campaign billboard learn: “I go to sleep when others discuss nonsense.”
The punk gambit nearly labored. Mr. Schwarzenberg made it to the runoff, however he misplaced to the populist Russia-friendly Milos Zeman, who had sturdy rural assist. Mr. Schwarzenberg remained in public life as a member of the Czech Chamber of Deputies and chief of the conservative TOP 09 get together, which he helped discovered.
It was as international minister that he made his biggest mark.
“He was like a personality out of a historical past e-book, or a storybook,” Norman L. Eisen, who was the U.S. ambassador to Prague from 2011 to 2014, mentioned in a phone interview. “He had an utter disregard for conference, regardless of being the scion of the European noble households that invented so a lot of these conventions,” Mr. Eisen mentioned. “Courtly, like a gentleman, but in addition earthy.” Mr. Eisen as soon as invited Mr. Schwarzenberg to a Shabbat on the embassy residence, and he recalled that the princely minister responded with glee: “Oh goody, I haven’t had a Shabbat dinner in years,” he mentioned.
Mr. Eisen recalled purchasing at Brooks Brothers with Mr. Schwarzenberg for his ubiquitous bow ties, on a visit to the US.
“He had a transparent and lifelike image of what worldwide relations have been about,” mentioned his deputy on the international ministry, Jiri Schneider, in a phone interview. “It was a mixture of recognizing realities and a transparent vocation to satisfy some values.”
Mr. Schwarzenberg proved to be significantly helpful to Czech governments, and particularly Mr. Havel’s, due to his intensive connections throughout Europe. “He put on the disposal of the nation his huge community of contacts,” mentioned Michael Zantovsky, Mr. Havel’s former press secretary, in a telephone interview. “He was our visiting card to courts and governments.”
Mr. Schwarzenberg was born on Dec. 10, 1937, in Prague to Karl VI, Prince of Schwarzenberg and Antonia Princess zu Fürstenberg. After the total German invasion in 1939, the household, which opposed the Nazis, retreated to the countryside. They fled once more after the Communist takeover in 1948, to exile in Austria, and their huge estates have been expropriated. Mr. Schwarzenberg studied forestry in Munich and legislation in Vienna, earlier than taking up the household holdings in Austria and Germany within the Sixties.
His coronary heart was elsewhere although, as he makes clear to his daughter within the movie she made about him. By means of political friendships in Vienna, within the Nineteen Eighties he grew to become chairman of the Worldwide Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, which battled Soviet domination in Japanese Europe. He was a part of the resistance to the Communist authorities in his homeland, donating his fortress in Scheinfeld, Bavaria, for use as a middle for smuggling computer systems and replica machines into Czechoslovakia, and smuggling dissident writings out, together with Mr. Havel’s.
When Mr. Havel appointed him chancellor after he grew to become president of Czechoslovakia in 1989, “it was the happiest day of my life,” he advised his daughter.
Mr. Schwarzenberg was a person of contradictions that he bridged with self-deprecating humor, those that knew him mentioned. “Virtually all the pieces he was, he additionally was not,” his daughter mentioned in a phone interview. “He was very, very conservative however unbelievably open-minded. He was very Catholic, however he lived a life that wasn’t essentially very Catholic,” she mentioned.
Mr. Havel as soon as mentioned of him: “He’s a unprecedented Czech, a unprecedented European and a unprecedented human being who, though pressured to spend most of his life exterior his homeland, has at all times remained a patriot. Though he was born an aristocrat, he’s a satisfied democrat and fighter for human rights.”
A number of days earlier than he died he defied his medical doctors, smoking a final, forbidden pipe and consuming a glass of wine, “a first-rate classic,” Mr. Zantovsky, the previous press secretary, mentioned.
In addition to his daughter, Lila, Mr. Schwarzenberg is survived by his spouse, Dr. Therese Schwarzenberg; his son Johannes, and a stepson, Karl Philipp Prinzhorn.
Barbora Petrova contributed reporting from Prague.
