Habsburgs: Dynasty, Culture and Politics by Paula Sutter Fichtner. London, Reaktion Books, 2014. xvi, 288 pp. $39.00 US (cloth). In 2014, commodification rules in Vienna. Empress Elisabeth (Sisi), the wife of Emperor Franz Joseph (1830-1916) is now the dominant Habsburg brand. Hofburg has been Sissified. It is now the site where visitors enjoy the Habsburg past as soap opera, continuing the Waltzing Volcano genre of history that endured well into the 1970s. It was only in the 1990s that the dynasty began to generate a flowering of a fresh historical, architectural, and cultural re-reinterpretation. Happily, Dr. Fichtner has built her book on this new generation of research and scholarship, but the integration of all the elements shows her own, broad expertise. She has written convincingly on Maximilian II, and Ferdinand I, on the Habsburg confrontation with Islam, and a general history of the empire. Dr. Fichtner takes almost the whole history of the Habsburgs, from Rudolph I in the thirteenth century to the death of Dr. Otto von Habsburg (as he carefully styled himself), bom in 1911 and died in the twenty-first century. However, by starting after the Habsburg's surprising ascent and ignoring the earlier centuries of crawling up from insignificance, she has missed an opportunity. little eleventh century fortalice, the Habichtsburg, close to the Rhine at Bragg in Switzerland, generated the family myth and legends that sustained them through hard times in succeeding centuries. After the death of Rudolph I in 1291, the Habsburgs declined precipitously. Even the most successful Habsburg of the fourteenth century, Rudolph IV, The Founder, ruled as Duke of Austria for only seven years, and died at the age of twenty-six. They survived through good luck, sustained generation after generation by a self-belief of almost biblical proportions: God predestined the Habsburgs to rule. Adversity might (and did) come repeatedly and yet the Habsburgs would always survive to fulfil their destiny. Dr. Fichtner shows the dynasty developing its ideology and identity. Over seven centuries the Habsburgs had an enduring set of values that lasted into the twentieth century. On the empire's very last day in 1918, Empress Zita would declare, Abdicate--never, never, never. I would rather fall here at your side ... And even if all of us were killed, there would still be other Habsburgs. Yet, adapt they did. Fichtner calls chapter four Tactics for New Times revealing how the dynasty responded to the pressures for change. From this point, the book gathers momentum. old Habsburg line died with Charles VI and the new Habsburg Lorraine dynasty took its place. Maria Theresa, her children, and their successors ruled one after another, until her descendent Franz Joseph I died in 1916. …