Differing Representations of the Life of Elisabeth, Empress of Au
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Daniela Richter Professor Katherine Arens German 382N: Intellectual History: Made in Austria December 10, 2002 “Die Leute wissen nicht, was sie mit mir beginnen sollen”: Differing Representations of the Life of Elisabeth, Empress of Austria For over a century, Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, has been a figure firmly enveloped in a tight cocoon of myth and legend. As such, she became a bestseller on the book market and in movie theaters. One of the most widely known representations of her is the 50’s German movie trilogy based losely on her life. These movies, featuring a teenage Romy Schneider and Karlheinz Böhme as the gentle, yet dashing young Franz Joseph, portrayed Elisabeth as a simple country girl who brings a fresh breeze of naiveté and artlessness to the stifling empirical court in Vienna. This specific way of presenting Elisabeth is by no means unusual. Aside from these movies there are a host of books which tend more towards fictional than historical accounts of her life. Even some of the biographies, which as a genre should be historically accurate, tend to lean towards a romanticizing portrayal of her life. The subject of this paper is a contrast between two biographies written about Elisabeth of Austria. The first one, Elisabeth-’Die seltsame Frau’, by Egon Caesar Conte Corti, dating back to 1935, is written in the romanticizing style, which is echoed in the movies. The second one, The Reluctant Empress, written by Brigitte Hamann, is a historically more accurate biography, published in 1982. This paper focuses on some of the critical and problematic aspects of Elisabeth’s life, her engagement to Franz Joseph, which marks the beginning of her life as Empress, her excessive preoccupation with sports and traveling, and finally, the Mayerling tragedy, in which Crown Prince Rudolf killed himself and his young companion Mary Vetsera. Another big issue in her life, is Elisabeth’s involvement in the political issues of her time, especially the compromise with Hungary. 1 However, this is a very complex issue which would exceed the boundaries of this paper. Therefore let it suffice to say that Hamann emphasizes Elisabeth’s political influence and activities considerably more than Corti does, who sees her generally as politically passive. The two biographies differ drastically in their style of narration. Corti’s biography reads like a fictional novel. There is hardly any direct reference to sources disrupting the flow of his narration, which gives the reader the sense that Corti is a kind of omniscient narrator, who seems moreover to have directly witnessed some of these events, since he offers personal experiences of people living in close proximity to the Empress, without pointing that out in the text as he goes. He uses a very emotionally invested style of language, which enhances the sense that the author was personally witnessing the events he describes. The biography is divided into 15 chapters, each with a host of smaller, often just one page long, subcategories. The chapter arrangement follows the chronological sequence of Elisabeth’s life, beginning with her engagement and ending with her death. Brigitte Hamann’s biography, on the other hand, reads strikingly different. She speaks with the voice of the more distanced historian, who names her sources directly instead of weaving them into a narrative net, which the reader cannot untangle anymore. Her fourteen chapters are arranged according to topics rather than chronology, although she still maintains a general chronological sequence among those issues. She also begins with Elisabeth’s engagement and ends with her death, but in between there are chapters like “The Cult of Beauty” and “The Burdens of Public Appearance” (v). She draws more heavily from Elisabeth’s poems, even in the titles to her chapters, as a way of carefully arriving at the personal view of Elisabeth. The obvious differences in the approach of both historians become even more apparent in their prefaces. Corti’s biography, titled Elisabeth - Die seltsame Frau, was the first official biography written about her. Previous to this work there was not much known about the private life of Elisabeth of Austria. The House of Habsburg was very skilled in keeping its family life a strictly private matter. A good public relations machinery and strict censorship were the means of controlling what became public and what did not. This secrecy partly contributed to the large amount of myths, rumors and gossip anecdotes surrounding the last Habsburg emperor and his family. 2 The structure of Corti’s preface already is indicative of his strategy as a biographer. He is emphasizing, even overly emphasizing, his historical credibility by quoting in the very first paragraph, people closest to the Empress. These would be - interestingly enough it is not the Emperor who is quoted - her ladies in waiting, Landgräfin von Fürstenberg and Ida von Ferenczy. Both of these quotes suffice to set the figure of Elisabeth up. She is the kind of person who inspires legends and she has recently come under attack together with the entire Habsburg Dynasty. Corti takes a strongly defensive position to this unjustified slandering, and his biography has to be seen in this light. He further declares that he wishes to clarify these misunderstandings by bringing his readers to a better understanding of Elisabeth and the circumstances of her life. She is to be made more accessible as a normal person, who has good and bad sides like everybody else. This seems contradictory, since he continually refers to her in a way that is denoting her as a monarch. He moreover claims that there is no need of criticism regarding any issue in Elisabeth’s life, although he admits that there are points in her life which are best described as precarious. Despite his professed objectivity, Corti in the title of the book still described or even stamped Elisabeth as “seltsam”. He deems previous publications on Elisabeth’s life worthless. The authors of those works are dismissed as completely unknowledgeable on the issue at hand. The sources at his disposal are radically different from the basis these people worked from. Corti, coming from an influential aristocratic family, which has had access to court circles for a long time, had direct access to original personal sources. Among those, listed proudly on the title page, are the personal effects of Elisabeth herself and the diaries of her daughter Marie Valerie. The list of aristocratic notables whom he thanks for assisting his research, is likewise very impressive. Overall, Corti seems to overly accentuate his credibility and the credibility of his research method. This, at least on a modern academic reader, has the effect that one now mistrusts his research, his sources and the objectivity of his work. His writing style in general betrays a certain kind of personal investment in the issue. By taking a resolute defensive stance on the issue of the Habsburg family, one cannot help but wonder how thoroughly and objectively he deals with what he himself calls “Heikles” (v). 3 Brigitte Hamann presents herself, her work and not least of all Elisabeth in a very different light. Her biography bears the title “The Reluctant Empress”, which together with the first line of her preface: “This book is the life story of a woman who refused to behave according to her rank.”, sets up an image of Elisabeth as somebody breaking the mold of a conventional role she was supposed to play (vii). Whereas Corti presented her from the perspective of someone deeply steeped into a monarchy-based society, Hamann sees her from the opposite angle. Here, Elisabeth becomes an untimely supporter of democracy, a rigorous individualist and the model of ‘Selbstverwirklichung’, by now a buzz-word in contemporary Western society. She presents Elisabeth’s life as a continuous struggle, which did not render any feeling of fulfillment or happiness for Elisabeth, which Hamann sees as the tragedy of her as well as Rudolf’s life, whom she considers very similar in terms of personality and their perspective on life. Elisabeth waged war on several fronts. She fought for beauty, resulting in rigorous exercise, which she could not keep up as she grew older. And finally, her most private struggle. Elisabeth wanted to be renown as a poet. Hamann declares these poems, which until then had been kept in secrecy in Swiss Federal Archives in Bern, as her primary source for her biography of Elisabeth. Since then, Hamann has published these poems as a poetic diary of Elisabeth. The fact that Elisabeth had entrusted these most private documents to a Swiss archive, furthermore indicates, in Hamann’s opinion, the strong democratic mind set of the Empress. As she lists her sources, it becomes apparent that Hamann was not as privileged as Corti in having free and direct access to these family papers. She is not clearly running in the same social circles as Corti did. Instead Hamann lists people, who managed to secure her access to these personal documents. In contrast to Corti, she only once states her perspective and work method as a biographer. She sees herself as a historical scholar and that is all she claims. Among historians this is enough. She does not have to mention over and over again, like Corti does, that she will stay away from any material that is not historically accredited. However, at the end of her preface, Hamann gets into a melodramatic depiction of Elisabeth’s life, setting her up as the “minus” to Franz Joseph’s “plus”, thereby not only instating them as polar opposites, but as cancelling each other out, which I do not think is an appropriate metaphor for their relationship (x).