Archduke Ferdinand Karl was born on 27 December 1868. Interested in literature and music, he dreamed of becoming the director of the Burgtheater one day. As no prospect existed for such a bourgeois career, he instead embarked on the traditional military path.
There was a curious parallel between the private lives of Ferdinand Karl and his elder brother, Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand — the very same whose assassination in Sarajevo triggered the First World War. As is well known, Franz Ferdinand eventually received Imperial permission for his morganatic marriage to Countess Sophie Chotek, after years of determined effort. Like many others, Ferdinand Karl initially opposed his brother’s choice, considering it irresponsible toward the dynasty.
The irony of fate was that he himself fell in love with a commoner, Bertha Czuber, the daughter of a mathematician with no aristocratic pedigree whatsoever. Even ‘worse’ — unlike his brother, Ferdinand Karl made no attempt to obtain the Emperor’s consent. Instead, he resigned from his military career (partly for health reasons) and married Bertha in secret. Over the next few years, the couple lived a restless life, travelling constantly — one might almost say perpetually eloping. When their clandestine marriage was uncovered in 1911, the Emperor excluded Ferdinand Karl from the Habsburg family and compelled him to relinquish all his titles.
By that time, Ferdinand Karl was already suffering from severe tuberculosis. Cared for devotedly by his wife, he spent his final years under the name Ferdinand Burg in a remote castle in South Tyrol. He returned to Vienna only once, to attend the funeral of his assassinated brother and sister-in-law in the summer of 1914 — just a few months before his own death.
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