The Last Palace: Europe's Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House

A sweeping narrative that refracts the history of 20th century Mitteleuropa through the lens of one of the last palaces built in Europe's Gilded Age, written in high style by its former resident and former US Ambassador to Czechia When Norman Eisen moved into the Ambassador's residence in Prague, t [...]
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A sweeping narrative that refracts the history of 20th century Mitteleuropa through the lens of one of the last palaces built in Europe's Gilded Age, written in high style by its former resident and former US Ambassador to Czechia When Norman Eisen moved into the Ambassador's residence in Prague, taking up his post as top diplomat, he was shocked to discover swastikas carved into some of its furniture. Hidden from view, these symbols of Nazi Germany were remnants of the grand house's forgotten history as the private residence of Prague's most powerful German general. From there Eisen unspools the twisting, captivating tale of the people who called this palace home. Eastern Europe's many dramatic political and social ruptures are drawn out through four of the palace's most important inhabitants: the optimistic Jewish financial baron, Otto Petschek, who built the palace after World War I as a statement of his faith in Europe; Rudolph Touissant, the cultured, complex German general who occupied it during World War II, ultimately saving the house and Prague itself from destruction; Lawrence Steinhardt, the first post-War US ambassador and a military hero who became obsessed with the property, pushing through US acquisition of it, but, in the process, neglecting to fight the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia; and Ambassador Shirley Temple Black, an eye-witness in 1968 to the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks, and later a crucial architect of Havel's Velvet Revolution in 1989. Weaving in Eisen's Czech mother's own story of surviving Auschwitz, these lives collectively tell the dramatic and strangely cyclical tale of a hundred years of European history.