Karel Schwarzenberg, renegade Czech prince and politician, dies at the age of 85

Karel Schwarzenberg, a Czech prince who was twice his country’s foreign minister, played a key role in this the Velvet Revolution and quietly undermined aristocratic expectations, died shortly after midnight on November 12 in a hospital in Vienna. He was 85.

His death was confirmed by the Czech Foreign Ministry and by his daughter Lila.

As foreign minister from 2007 to 2009 and from 2010 to 2013, Mr. Schwarzenberg was a committed Atlanticist and European who opposed Russia’s imperial ambitions. Before his government posts, as a supporter of his country’s dissidents against the then communist regime, he dedicated an ancestral castle in Germany and his own money to the cause. Later he became chancellor under his friend Vaclav Havel when the latter was elected president.

But it was the pipe-smoking and moustachioed Mr. Schwarzenberg’s understated rebellion against his aristocratic heritage, one of the largest in Europe, that captivated and endeared him to the Czech public, leading him to run for president in 2013. His official campaign poster was punk -inspired and showed him a pink mohawk.

His full name and title was Karel Johannes Nepomuk Joseph Norbert Friedrich Antonius Wratislaw Mena Fürst zu Schwarzenberg, and his lineage, dating back to the 15th century and even before, included barons, counts, princes and field marshals, and at least one cardinal and bishop. .

For centuries, their holdings included magnificent castles throughout Bohemia, Austria and Germany, including the Palais Schwarzenberg in Vienna. Some are still in the family. “The gift of Metternich in the 18th century,” Mr. Schwarzenberg said to his daughter, Lila Schwarzenberg, in a long hall of guns in the ancestral castle of Orlik, in a moving film from 2022 she made about him. “And that, that was a gift from Napoleon,” he said casually.

But when the Czech artist David Cerny, aged 75, suggested using a Sex Pistols album cover as a model in Mr Schwarzenberg’s presidential campaign, the prince-turned-politician jumped at the opportunity. “Yes, it’s fantastic,” he said. “Sex Pistols, I love it,” Mr. Cerny recalled in a telephone interview from Prague. “He was super aristocratic, but he was quite, quite punk,” the artist recalled.

He spoke the archaic Czech of his ancestors and wore a T-shirt in tribute to modern underground poet Ivan “Magor” Jirous. Czech critics called him a dilettante, but polls showed he had high public confidence and was considered above widespread political corruption. Mr. Schwarzenberg turned his habit of falling asleep during politicians’ speeches to his advantage; a billboard for the campaign read: “I fall asleep when others talk nonsense.”

The punk gambit almost worked. Mr. Schwarzenberg made it to the second round but lost to the populist, Russia-friendly Milos Zeman, who had strong rural support. Mr. Schwarzenberg remained in public life as a member of the Czech Chamber of Deputies and leader of the conservative TOP 09 party, which he helped found.

He made his greatest impression as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

“He was like a character from a history book or a storybook,” Norman L. Eisen, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Prague from 2011 to 2014, said in a telephone interview. “He had a total disregard for convention, despite being the scion of the European noble families who invented so many of those conventions,” Mr. Eisen said. “Courtly, like a gentleman, but also earthy.” Mr. Eisen once invited Mr. Schwarzenberg to a Shabbat at the embassy residence, and he recalled that the princely minister responded cheerfully: “Oh dear, I haven’t had a Shabbat dinner for years,” he said.

Mr. Eisen recalled shopping with Mr. Schwarzenberg at Brooks Brothers for its ubiquitous bow ties during a trip to the United States.

“He had a clear and realistic view of what international relations meant,” his deputy at the Foreign Ministry, Jiri Schneider, said in a telephone interview. “It was a mix of recognizing reality and a clear calling to fulfill certain values.”

Mr. Schwarzenberg proved particularly valuable to the Czech governments, especially Mr. Havel’s, because of his extensive connections across Europe. “He put his extensive network of contacts at the disposal of the nation,” Michael Zantovsky, Mr. Havel’s former press secretary, said in a telephone interview. “He was our calling card for courts and governments.”

Mr. Schwarzenberg was born in Prague on December 10, 1937, the son of Karl VI, Prince of Schwarzenberg and Antonia Prinses zu Fürstenberg. After the full German invasion in 1939, the family, which resisted the Nazis, retreated to the countryside. After the communist takeover in 1948, they fled again to exile in Austria, and their vast estates were expropriated. Mr Schwarzenberg studied forestry in Munich and law in Vienna before taking over the family businesses in Austria and Germany in the 1960s.

However, his heart lay elsewhere, as he makes clear to his daughter in the film she made about him. Through political friendships in Vienna, he became chairman of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights in the 1980s, which fought Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. He was part of the resistance against the communist government in his home country and donated his castle in Scheinfeld, Bavaria, to be used as a center for smuggling computers and copiers into Czechoslovakia, and smuggling dissident writings, including that of Mr. Havel.

When Mr. Havel appointed him chancellor after he became president of Czechoslovakia in 1989, “that was the happiest day of my life,” he told his daughter.

Mr. Schwarzenberg was a man of contradictions that he bridged with self-mockery, those who knew him said. “Almost everything he was, he wasn’t,” his daughter said in a telephone interview. “He was very, very conservative, but incredibly open-minded. He was very Catholic, but he lived a life that was not necessarily very Catholic,” she said.

Mr. Havel once said of him: “He is an extraordinary Czech, an extraordinary European and an extraordinary human being who, although forced to spend most of his life outside his homeland, has always remained a patriot. Although he was born an aristocrat, he is a convinced democrat and fighter for human rights.”

Just days before his death, he defied his doctors, smoked a last, forbidden pipe and drank a glass of wine, “a first-class vintage,” said Zantovsky, the former press secretary.

In addition to his daughter Lila, Mr. Schwarzenberg is survived by his wife, Dr. Therese Schwarzenberg; his son Johannes, and a stepson, Karl Philipp Prinzhorn.

Barbara Petrova contributed reporting from Prague.