B008AITH44 EBOK

by Hamann, Brigitte

  Even years later, Elisabeth lamented the death of her royal cousin; she went so far as to work herself into a melancholy quite out of proportion with the extent of her friendship with Ludwig. She, who had seen the living Ludwig only on the rarest of occasions, now made an idol of the memory of the dead “eagle.” In his memory, Elisabeth even went to Bayreuth in 1888 (for the first and last time in her life) to attend a performance of Parsifal. Her response to the music was extremely sentimental. “Since then, I feel homesick for it as I do for the North Sea. It is something of which we wish that it would never end, that it continue forever.”30 Archduchess Valerie: “Mama was so ravished that she wished to see the conductor, Mottl, and the singers [who took the parts] of Parsifal and Amfortas … their unpoetical appearance diminished the illusion somewhat.”31

  The Empress also had a long conversation with Cosima Wagner; they spoke especially about Ludwig. Cosima Wagner later told Elisabeth’s niece Amélie that “she had never yet seen anyone so affected as Aunt Sisi after the Parsifal.”32 Cosima Wagner, too, mentioned the resemblance between Ludwig II and Elisabeth.

  *

  As Elisabeth’s spiritualist tendencies increased in the late 1880s, Ludwig’s figure assumed greater importance in her imagination. She repeatedly mentioned that he had “appeared” to her and had spoken. In her growing isolation, Ludwig’s destiny seemed to her almost enviable.

  Und dennoch, ja dennoch beneide ich dich,

  Du lebtest den Menschen so ferne,

  Und, jetzt, da die göttliche Sonne dir wich,

  Beweinen dich oben die Sterne.33

  [And yet, and yet I envy you, / You lived so distant from men, / And now that the divine sun has evaded you, / The stars above weep for you.]

  The Empress drew consolation and even a kind of piety from these spiritualist encounters, as Valerie described in her diary in 1887.

  Thank God Mama has struggled through her weltschmerz and her doubts of last year more successfully than I—her faith in Jehovah, into Whose arms she threw herself after the King’s death in order to find rest from the torments that persecuted her, is absolute; she attributes everything to His disposition and guidance, she leaves everything in His hands. I have never known Mama to be so devout as [she has been] since that time—it leads me to believe that her spiritual dealings with Heine and the King are countenanced by God…. Mama’s piety is, however, different from other people’s … extravagant and abstract as her death cult.34

  And shortly thereafter, Valerie wrote, “Since her intense spiritual dealings Mama really is … calmer and happier, and in meditating and composing poetry … she has found a satisfying lifework.”35 Elisabeth’s poems also confirm the fact that her spiritual congress with her dead “royal cousin” brought her comfort and relief.

  In this, the Empress was supported by one of the friends of her youth, Countess Irene Paumgarten, in Munich. In a “very confidential” report to Bismarck, Prince Eulenburg revealed what only “a few initiates” knew. “Countess Paumgarten is a so-called ‘writing medium.’ She has the ability of writing ‘automatically,’ which is to say: her hand is guided by ‘spirits’ while she falls into a dreamlike somnambulistic state. When asked questions, she writes down the answers given by the ‘spirits.’ The Empress has been in touch with this medium for years. She uses her stays in Munich for ‘sessions,’ but she also sends written inquiries to the Countess when she encounters problems in her life.”36

  Naturally, Elisabeth was not alone in her interest in spiritualism. Séances with table tilting and the most diverse mediums had become the rage among high society. The famous mediums did a thriving business, though now and then one of them was unmasked as a fraud—the medium Bastian, for example, was found out by none other than Elisabeth’s son, Crown Prince Rudolf, during a sensational session in 1884. Rudolf was among the most active opponents of the spiritualist fad, even writing a pamphlet, Einige Worte über den Spiritismus (A Few Words About Spiritualism), which was published anonymously in 1882. These activities of the Crown Prince’s were indirectly aimed at his mother, though she was, of course, as unaware of Rudolf’s antispiritualist pamphlet as she was of his other writings.

  Prince Eulenburg also found nothing unusual in the fact that Empress Elisabeth was a spiritualist. For him (and for the person to whom the report was addressed, Prince Bismarck), the only significant question was whether or not Countess Paumgarten was exerting political influence on the Empress. And in this regard, Eulenburg could reassure the chancellor. “I am unable to call the Countess’s automatic writing mischief because she is acting bone fide and her character guarantees her honesty. Nor does the Countess use her influential connections in any way for personal purposes. But that Her Majesty’s belief in the messages from the spirit world can under certain circumstances have great significance can surely not be in doubt.”

  Sisi even took Marie Valerie along on one such visit. The practical fifteen-year-old, however, was anything but pleased with the spiritualist conversations and, astonished, wrote in her diary the following exchange between Elisabeth and Irene Paumgarten: Elisabeth begged her friend, “Tonight lay Empress Marianne at our feet” (Empress Maria Anna was the wife of Emperor Ferdinand I; she had died in 1884). Whereupon Irene Paumgarten replied, “Oh, she is still wandering along dark paths.”37

  In her diary (not found to this day but quoted by Marie Larisch), the Empress explained her tendencies.

  I do not belong to those whose spiritual senses are closed off. And that is why I hear—or, rather, feel—the thoughts and the will concerning me of my spirit. That is why I see blonde Else of the Rhine and Bubi [her nephew Taxis, who died young], once I also saw Max [Emperor Maximilian of Mexico], but he did not have the strength to tell me what he clearly wished to tell me…. These images come to me in a waking state, just as memory arouses “phantoms” while we sleep. But what I see in the waking state are not phantoms, not hallucinations, as some people, who lack understanding, claim, and so give a meaningless word instead of a logical explanation…. It gives me great satisfaction and deep reassurance in many an hour that I can make a connection with spirits from the beyond. But with very few exceptions, people do not understand that. And whatever ignorant people do not understand, they declare to be nonsense.38

  The Empress tried to receive messages from the other world by every conceivable method. She also tried to fathom the future, and she was highly superstitious. Marie Larisch: “Sometimes … she beat the white of an egg in a glass of water, and together we tried to read portents in the shapes it assumed. Whenever Elisabeth saw a magpie, she bowed to it three times, and when the moon was new, she begged that long-harbored wishes might come true. The Empress firmly believed in the protective power of cold steel and never passed nails or cast horseshoes without picking them up. She had a boundless fear of the evil eye and was afraid of the baneful influence of those who had it.”39

  Elisabeth also believed all prophecies, such as the one about the legendary Monk of the Tegernsee, whose damned soul would be released only along with that of the last survivor of the ducal line in Bavaria. Repeatedly the Empress related that the monk had prophesied to her, “Before a hundred years have passed, our line will have died out!”40 In view of the considerable number of young princes, these words sounded unlikely. (The hundred years have since passed, and the line of the dukes in Bavaria is, in fact, extinct. The current head of the house, Duke Max of Bavaria, comes from the royal line, having been adopted by the last male representative of the ducal house and appointed his heir.)

  Elisabeth told not only her daughter Valerie, but also Marie Larisch about the “apparitions” of Ludwig II. Once, she said, she had heard a noise like the gurgling of water while she lay in bed.

  Gradually this soft trickle filled the whole room, and I experienced the entire plight of drowning. I wheezed and choked and struggled for air, then the horror disappeared, with my last strength I sat up in bed and could breathe freely again. The moon had risen, and its glow
turned the room bright as day. Then I saw the door slowly opening, and Ludwig entered. His clothing was soaked with water, which ran down and formed small puddles on the parquet floor. His damp hair was sticking to his white face, but it was Ludwig, looking just as he did in life.

  Then, Elisabeth continued, a conversation with Ludwig’s spirit took place, and he spoke of a woman who was burning: “I know that it is a woman who loved me, and until her destiny is fulfilled, I shall never be free. But afterward you will meet us, and the three of us will be happy together in Paradise.” It is not surprising that in her book, published in 1913, Marie Larisch interpreted these prophecies as referring to the death of Ludwig’s one-time fiancée, Sophie Alençon, in 1897 in a fire, and to the Empress’s death, which occurred a year later. Elisabeth to Marie Larisch: “But while I spoke, the apparition vanished; once again I heard the dripping of unseen water and the gurgle of the lake against the shore. I was seized with horror, for I felt the nearness of the shades from that other world who were holding out their ghostly arms, seeking the comfort of the living.”41

  Beginning in the mid-1880s, the Empress repeatedly spoke of suicide. The waters of Lake Starnberg, where Ludwig II had perished, held a particularly strong attraction for her.

  Marie Valerie was one of the few people who clearly understood Elisabeth’s poor emotional state. Her diary records her concern at the vehemence and despair with which the forty-eight-year-old Empress reacted, for example, to an attack of sciatica. “Much worse than the ailment is Mama’s indescribable despair and hopelessness. She says that it is a torment to be alive, and she indicates that she wants to kill herself. ‘Then you will go to hell,’ Papa said. And Mama replied, ‘But we already have hell on earth!’” And the distressed seventeen-year-old reassured herself: “That Mama will never kill herself—of that I am confident; that she feels her life to be a burden and that to know this makes Papa just as unhappy as it makes me—about that I could weep for hours.”42

  Notes

  1. Richard Sexau, Fürst und Arzt (Graz, 1963), p. 131.

  2. Philipp Fürst zu Eulenberg-Hertefeld, Aus fünfzig Jahren: Erinnerungen des Fürsten Philipp zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld (Berlin, 1925), p. 130.

  3. Luise von Kobell, Unter den ersten vier Königen Bayerns (Munich, 1894), p. 241.

  4. Scharding, p. 191, Ludwig to Count Dürckheim, January 8, 1877.

  5. Marie Louise von Wallersee, Kaiserin Elisabeth und ich (Leipzig, 1935), pp. 74f.

  6. Philipp Fürst zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld, Das Ende Ludwigs II. und andere Erlebnisse, Vol. I (Leipzig, 1934), p. 96.

  7. Oskar Freiherr von Mitis, Das Leben des Kronprinzen Rudolf, revised by Adam Wandruszka (Vienna, 1971), p. 225, March 9, 1878.

  8. Sexau Papers, Ludwig to Sophie, from Munich, April 28, 1867.

  9. Ibid., Ludwig to von der Pfordten, July 19, 1865.

  10. GHA, from Schönbrunn, December 11 (no year).

  11. Rudolf, box 18, March 31, 1865.

  12. Sexau, p. 174.

  13. Gottfried von Böhm, Ludwig II, König von Bayern, Vol. II (Berlin, 1924), p. 402.

  14. Festetics, September 21, 1872.

  15. Otto Gerold, Die letzten Tage Ludwigs II (Zurich, 1903).

  16. Corti Papers, from Steephill Castle, September 26, 1874.

  17. Festetics, January 18, 1874.

  18. Elisabeth, manuscript, for both poem and letter.

  19. Festetics, January 18, 1874.

  20. Valerie, June 4, 1885.

  21. Konstantin Christomanos, Tagebuchblätter (Vienna, 1899), pp. 92.f.

  22. Valerie, December 13, 1902, Interview with Count Dürckheim. This source must be given credence over a letter from Prince Philipp Eulenburg to Herbert Count Bismarck of August 5, 1886, which is based on Munich gossip and describes Elisabeth’s alleged plan to flee with Ludwig II. “She intended driving to Gudden and begging him to be allowed to walk alone with the King for 1/4 hour—which he would undoubtedly have permitted. Thereupon she planned to flee with the King.—That would have made a fine mess!” Elisabeth’s low emotional state after Ludwig’s death was well known in Munich. According to Eulenburg, “the Empress fell into a despair that bordered on madness.” John C. G. Röhl, ed., Philipp Eulenburgs Politische Korrespondenz, Vol. I (Boppard, 1976), p. 191.

  23. Valerie, June 16, 1886.

  24. Berliner Tageblatt, April 21, 1889.

  25. Corti Papers, from Feldafing, June 10, 1886.

  26. Amélie, June 14, 1886, and May 23, 1887.

  27. Valerie, June 20, 1886.

  28. Ibid., June 10, 1886.

  29. Ibid., June 19, 1886.

  30. Amélie, August 23, 1888.

  31. Valerie, August 19, 1888.

  32. Amélie, March 21, 1889.

  33. Elisabeth, manuscript, 1888, “Dem todten Aar.”

  34. Valerie, May 18, 1887.

  35. Ibid., June 18, 1887.

  36. AA, Österreich 86, No. 1, Vol. II, from Munich, May 2, 1888.

  37. Valerie, June 21, 1884.

  38. Wallersee, Elisabeth, p. 252.

  39. Maria Freiin von Wallersee, Meine Vergangenheit (Berlin, 1913), p. 82.

  40. Wallersee, Elisabeth, p. 164.

  41. Wallersee, Vergangenheit, pp. 123ff.

  42. Valerie, December 20, 1885.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HEINE’S DISCIPLE

  Emperor Franz Joseph did his utmost to make life in Vienna as agreeable as possible for his wife and to fulfill her wishes. Since she was not comfortable either in the Hofburg or in Schönbrunn, Laxenburg, or Hetzendorf, in the mid-1880s he built her a summer residence of her own at the center of the deer park in Lainz, where she would be entirely free from court life. Designed by Karl Hasenauer, the architect of the Ringstrasse, the mansion turned into a little castle altogether to her taste. In front of the building stands a statue of Elisabeth’s favorite Greek god, Hermes (which also gave the house its name, Hermes Villa), on the balcony a bust of Heinrich Heine, in the entrance hall a statue of the dying Achilles. The walls and ceilings of Elisabeth’s bedroom were covered with frescoes depicting scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (painted by the young, then still unknown, Gustav Klimt after drawings by Makart). The centerpiece, at Elisabeth’s bed of state, depicted Titania with the ass—a joke that can hardly have pleased the Emperor. The walls of the exercise room were covered with frescoes showing antique gladiatorial battles, just as much an expression of Elisabeth’s love of Greece as were the numerous small Greek sculptures.

  What Elisabeth valued most of all about the mansion in Lainz—“Titania’s dream castle,” as she called it—was the solitude at the heart of an unspoiled forest, home to a great many deer. The Lainz deer park was surrounded by a wall. Guards kept watch on the gates. No outsider was allowed to glimpse the mansion when Elisabeth was in residence. She could go walking for hours, observing the deer (she always carried wooden rattles with her to protect her from wild boars, who were afraid of the noise) or composing poems.

  At first, the Empress had misgivings about the modern sanitary arrangements, such as the built-in bathroom (the other imperial castles did not yet sport such modern fashions). For under these circumstances, “so and so many bathing women, whose job it was to set up and fill the tubs,” would “be deprived of their occupation.” Another innovation to which she was unaccustomed were the sinks in the corridors. Once the architect, Hasenauer, saw the Empress with evident pleasure turning the faucets on and off again and again, because she had never encountered such a thing before.1

  When, in May 1887, the imperial family spent the night in Lainz for the first time, Marie Valerie moaned with homesickness for Bad Ischl. “Sadly I lay down on my white bed, which stands in a strange alcove and from which a most affected chubby-faced cherub stares down at me.” Nor did Valerie approve of the Empress’s state rooms. “Mama’s rooms have the best will in the world to be enormously friendly, but I detest their mannered rococo. Oh—if only we were home again!”2

  Valerie found the
Hermes Villa “actually uninvitingly handsome and modern, and it is not at all like us and what we have been used to so far.”3 For his part, Emperor Franz Joseph once again responded with helplessness, as he did when faced with so many ideas his wife got in her head: “I shall always be afraid that I will spoil everything.”

  *

  But now that she owned her own secluded castle, Elisabeth had no intention whatever of spending more time in Vienna. She stayed in her sinfully expensive villa for only a few days each year before setting out on her travels once more. Though she no longer went hunting, she took long sight-seeing trips, preferably abroad.

  At this time, Elisabeth was quite unmistakably in a serious crisis. She was nearly fifty. The splendor of her beauty had faded. She hid her wrinkles behind fans and umbrellas. The “Queen Riding to Hounds,” once so energetic and zestful, was suffering from sciatica and deep nervous disorders. In spite of her outstanding intellectual gifts, Elisabeth was without influence. One last time, she pulled herself together and tried to give some meaning to her life—though not, of course, within the framework of her imperial position or her family. Rather, she began to write poetry with a matchless intensity, and she wrested a bitter balance from her life.

  Verlassen (Gödöllö 1886)

  In meiner grossen Einsamkeit