Mach’ ich die kleinen Lieder;
Das Herz, voll Gram und Traurigkeit,
Drückt mir den Geist darnieder.
Wie war ich einst so jung und reich
An Lebenslust und Hoffen;
Ich wähnte nichts an Kraft mir gleich,
Die Welt stand mir noch offen.
Ich hab’ geliebt, ich hab’ gelebt,
Ich hab’ die Welt durchzogen;
Doch nie erreicht, was ich erstrebt.—
Ich hab’ und ward betrogen!4
[Abandoned (Gödöllö 1886): In my great loneliness, / I make tiny songs; / My heart, filled with grief and sadness, / Weighs down my spirit. / / Once I was so young and rich / In love of life and hope; / I thought nothing could match my strength, / The whole world was open to me. / / I loved, I lived, / I wandered through the world; / But never reached what I strove for.— / I deceived and was deceived.]
Elisabeth had given up all hope of finding understanding among her contemporaries. More than ever, she frequented the company of spirits and placed all her hopes in the “souls of the future,” for whom she wrote her poems. She decided that, unlike the poems she had written when she was young, her verses from the 1880s should see publication. She chose 1950 as the date of printing—a time, that is, when none of her contemporaries, any more than herself, would still be alive. Elisabeth wanted, at least posthumously, to gain what her contemporaries denied her: justification, understanding, lasting fame. The often confused hymns to liberty in many of these poems were modeled on Heine’s. They were also intended as comfort for the oppressed in future times.
Elisabeth gave extraordinary care to safeguarding her poetry for posterity. During the winter of 1886 and 1887, she had copies made under the seal of the strictest secrecy and with the help of two family members who came from Bavaria for the purpose: Marie Larisch and Marie’s (nonaristocratic) cousin Henny Pecz. Countess Larisch’s claim that these copies were intended to serve as manuscripts for a secret printing of the poems5 at first sounded fantastic; but by now her statements can no longer be so easily dismissed. The Empress’s literary estate in the Swiss Federal Archives actually includes, along with the manuscript originals, anonymous printings, until now unknown, of two volumes of poems(Winterlieder [Winter Songs] and Nordseelieder [Songs of the North Sea]), which are identical with the manuscripts.
In 1890, Elisabeth deposited a sealed casket containing both the originals and the printed versions in the Hofburg, with instructions that after her death, it be given to her brother Duke Karl Theodor. She requested that he, in turn, keep the box and, after a period of sixty years, pass it on to the Swiss federal president. This request was honored in 1951. The same instructions also provided that some of her closest friends—such as “beautiful prince” Rudolf Liechtenstein—be given printed copies of the poems. Prince Liechtenstein’s estate in Brno and the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna made available an additional copy of each volume to Switzerland.
(How many copies were in other hands and have been lost we cannot know. Elisabeth did not herself deal with the printer—as her son Rudolf did in similar situations—but remained entirely anonymous.)
To the casket meant for her brother, the Empress added a letter in her own hand, addressed to the recipient she had destined to sort and publish the poems in the future.
Dear Future Soul!
To you I pass on these writings. The Master dictated them to me, and he has determined their purpose—that is, sixty years from 1890, they are to be published to benefit political prisoners and their needy families. For in sixty years no more than today will happiness and peace—I mean liberty—be established on our little star. Perhaps on another one? Today I am unable to tell you this, perhaps by the time you read these lines—Cordially, for I sense that you wish me well,
Titania
written in midsummer of the year 1890 in a rapidly speeding special train.6
These complicated provisions indicate how deeply persecuted she felt, how suspicious she was of the Austrian authorities and of the Habsburg family, whom she did not trust to have sufficient loyalty to safeguard her poems. Even Emperor Franz Joseph, we must conclude from all these secret actions, knew nothing of the arcane dispositions his wife made for the “future souls.”
Nor did Elisabeth show faith in the stability of the monarchy. Just as she transferred a large part of her wealth (without the Emperor’s knowledge) to the banking House of Rothschild in Switzerland, so as to be secure in case of forced emigration, she also assigned the most valuable asset she had to leave to posterity—her writings—to Switzerland. She praised that nation in several poems as the “bulwark of liberty,” and she considered its republican form of government safer for the future than a monarchy.
In a short covering letter to the president of Switzerland, the Empress repeated the intended purpose of the money to be brought in by publication. “After sixty years, the profits are to be used exclusively for helpless children of political prisoners of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.”7
To this day, the “future souls” cannot easily fulfill the Empress’s explicit request. For though it is fairly plain that she wanted to express criticism of the political conditions in the Danube monarchy, it is still completely uncertain what sort of political prisoners she had in mind. Who were the political prisoners of 1890? Socialists, anarchists, German nationalists; but Elisabeth cannot have meant these. Might she, as so often, have been thinking of the families of the Hungarian revolutionaries who rose against the Austrian central government of 1848–1849? And how can their descendants be found today?
Elisabeth’s arrangements, however, show that she was convinced of the quality of her poems. She was totally unaware that her writing was little more than dilettante rhyming.
For almost ten years, Elisabeth concentrated on her poetry. During this time, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, turned into the self-styled Titania, Queen of the Fairies. Her husband the Emperor, unsuitable as it might have been to his personality, became Oberon, King of the Fairies. Fairies and sprites, but especially the figure of the “Master,” Heinrich Heine, began to fill Elisabeth’s life. The real people of her empire were as foreign to her as the problems of her family, including those of her son, whose sad fate fulfilled itself during this same decade—without his mother’s acknowledging or even having an inkling of his difficulties.
Only a very few intimates knew about the Empress’s versifying. Archduchess Marie Valerie, who probably was the most involved in listening to and reciting her mother’s poems, considered Elisabeth a major poet. Nevertheless, occasionally she made fun of Sisi’s urgent need to communicate at once to the “future souls” every little disagreement, every annoyance, couching it in poetic form. It was, she noted, a “shared family trait to leave everything to posterity. Surely one day posterity will call us a funny family.”8 Valerie complained: “strange life, my mother’s—her thoughts are occupied by the past, her activities deal with the distant future. The present is, to her, an insubstantial shadow, her greatest pride that no one suspects she is a poet.”9
For at first, Elisabeth did not tell the Emperor about her writing. She showed him only the childish rhymes of Archduchess Valerie, whom she talked into believing herself to be an equally gifted poet. The young girl, who is more likely to have inherited her father’s practical cast of mind than her mother’s dreamy temperament, was reluctant. Somewhat at a loss, she wrote in her diary, “Mama wants me to give my poems to Papa tomorrow, which makes me unhappy, for I am convinced that Papa thinks it affected to write poetry.”10 Countess Festetics also cautiously noted, concerning the Emperor, “The poetic vein is not very strongly developed in him.”11
Gyula Andrássy was another of the few who were initiated into the secret. He took the Empress’s poems as the welcome occasion for compliments, in 1889 writing to Sisi’s chamberlain, Baron Nopcsa, “You know what a high opinion I have always had of her mind and her heart, but since reading a
few of her poems, this opinion has grown into the highest admiration, and the fact that in her being, so much feeling is united with so much intellect, which would do honor even to the greatest man, I can only say briefly that no other such woman exists on earth. One thing saddens me, however, and that is that so few people know what she is. I would wish that the whole world were informed about it and admired her as such a rare personality deserves.”12
Elisabeth’s brother, the ophthalmologist Karl Theodor, saw this new preoccupation with a far more sober and worried eye. He found the poems that were shown him very beautiful but warned Elisabeth against “burrowing so deeply into the extravagant ideas in which she lives, for he thinks that this imaginary spiritual intercourse with Heine might so overly strain her nerves that in the end, she might ‘crack up.’”13 Within the family, Karl Theodor spoke bluntly about Sisi, “who is intelligent but has a ‘definite kink.’”14
Elisabeth’s father, Duke Max, had always taken a highly critical view of his daughters, including Elisabeth. On the occasion of his diamond wedding anniversary in September 1888, he read to the assembled family his favorite passage from a newly published book, Das Nervöse Jahrhundert (The Nervous Century) by Paolo Mantegazza: “The nervousness of those who do no work can be cured only gradually—not until, that is, the dukes, counts, and barons teach their children that work is the best occupation for the nobility and at the same time the surest road to a long and happy life.”15 This quotation was soon afterward reprinted in a celebratory article on the anniversary in the Vienna Fremdenblatt—coming close to public criticism of the Empress. The relationship between Elisabeth and her father, who was quite ill by this time, was so bad that she did not even attend his funeral in Munich in November 1888—officially because of her own precarious health.
*
Elisabeth’s poems from the 1880s (after Rudolf’s death in 1889, she abruptly stopped writing poetry) cover about six hundred printed pages. They constitute one long hymn to the extravagantly idolized Heine. Her adoration went far beyond the usual appreciation of a literary being, the Empress knew long passages by heart and intensively studied the poet’s life. She believed herself closely linked to Heine, who had died in Paris in 1856, considered herself his disciple, was even convinced that he was dictating the verses for her pen to record. “Every word, every letter, anything by Heine is a jewel,” Elisabeth wrote to Valerie, confessing that the poet “is with me always and everywhere.”16
This close link with her beloved dead Master was another form of flight, no different from riding or traveling.
Elisabeth was firmly convinced of her spiritual dealings with Heine. For example, she described to Valerie one such apparition in all its details. One evening in bed, she related, she had suddenly seen before her Heine’s profile, as it was known to her from one of his portraits. She had
the strange … but pleasant sensation as if this soul wished to separate hers from her body. This struggle lasted a few seconds, but Jehovah did not permit her soul to leave the body. The apparition disappeared and, in spite of her disappointment at having to go on living, Mama was left for a long time with a happy strengthening of faith, a greater love for Jehovah, and the conviction that Heine’s soul was with Him and that He permitted it to maintain its connection with Mama’s soul. And Mama affirms the story even today and says she could swear any oath that this is true and that she saw the apparition while she was fully awake and with her actual eyes.17
The Empress collected editions of Heine’s works and portraits of the poet. She surrounded herself with busts of Heine. She called on Heine’s aged sister, Charlotte von Embden, in Hamburg and visited Heine’s grave in Paris.
Elisabeth also shared the Master’s likes and dislikes. For example, she took an interest in the Hebrew poet Jehuda ben Halevy, whom Heine had praised in “Romanzero.” At that time, one of the foremost Halevy scholars, Professor Seligmann Heller, was living in Vienna. Unannounced and without having exchanged so much as a line with the scholar beforehand, Elisabeth appeared at Heller’s home one day. Heller was standing “at the window in his comfortable house jacket, looking out at the street, when he saw an equipage drive up to his house and stop. Since he was shortsighted, he could not make out that it was a court coach; he only joked to his son about an elegant carriage stopping before the old suburban house and whether he might be the intended recipient of the visit. A few moments later, there was a knock at the door, and the Empress stood before the surprised writer and scholar. In her own simple way, which immediately banished embarrassment, she explained the purpose of her visit. She spoke about Jehuda ben Halevy, whom she knew only from Heine’s verses, but whose own writings she was eager to learn with Heller’s help.”
Seligmann Heller delivered an improvised lecture on the life and work of the Hebrew poet, explaining also the difficulty of putting oneself into so entirely alien an intellectual world. The Empress, he suggested, would do well to stick to Heine’s “openly laudatory judgment.”18
Elisabeth’s reputation as a Heine expert was so great that occasionally she was asked for advice, for example by one literary historian from Berlin. He turned to the Empress with three unpublished Heine poems and asked for her opinion as to whether the somewhat problematic verses should be published. Elisabeth replied in a long letter in her own hand, declaring one of the poems to be spurious (and she was right, as subsequent examination proved) and advocating publication of the other two, “for Heine’s public are the peoples of the earth, and they have a right to know him completely, especially as the poet himself, unlike the majority of other poets, scorned all dissimulation and always liked to present himself as he was, with all his virtues and human failings.”19
*
Elisabeth’s veneration for Heine did not rule out absorption in other poets. She continued enthusiastically to read Shakespeare’s plays, and she had committed most of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to memory. With Marie Valerie she read Faust (unabridged, something considered unsuitable for a young girl of the period, because of the “immoral” tragedy of Gretchen). In the late 1880s, she began to study ancient Greek, so as to be able to read Homer in the original, but subsequently she concentrated on modern Greek. For practice, for example, she translated Hamlet from English into modern Greek. In 1892 she also tackled some passages by Schopenhauer but complained, “If only each day were twice as long; I cannot learn and read as much as I would like.”20 She gave a reason for spending hours a day studying Greek, not stopping until she mastered the language: “It is so beneficial to have to struggle with something difficult, so as to forget one’s own thoughts.”21
As with Hungarian, Elisabeth also favored the demotic Greek the people spoke. She explained this preference to one of her readers very much in Heine’s manner. “The only reason for my preference for the popular language is that I wish to speak the language spoken by ninety percent of the population, and not that of the professors and politicians. If there is anything I abhor, it is pretence in thought, writing, or anything else.”22
On her walks, she was accompanied by a Greek student, who was made not only to speak Greek with her, but also to read to her as they walked. This was a difficult endeavor, given the Empress’s rapid pace, and elicited many astonished glances from passersby. When Elisabeth asked her brother Karl Theodor why he, too, did not make use of walks to have foreign languages read to him, he answered, “Because they would think I had gone mad.” To which Elisabeth replied, “Does that matter? Is it not enough that we ourselves know that we are not?” Marie von Redwitz, a Bavarian lady-in-waiting, who overheard this conversation, commented, “With this she explained so much in her own life. She did what gave her pleasure, and she left it to others to believe whatever they chose. With all her peculiarities, as a person she had remained simple and entirely natural.”23
The love of Greece was a Wittelsbach family tradition. Elisabeth’s uncle, King Ludwig I, had also loved Greece, as did his son Otto, who was King of Greece from 1832 to 1862. Duri
ng that time, many Bavarians made their way to Greece and gave personal and financial aid to develop the country impoverished by the long Turkish occupation. Elisabeth’s father, Duke Max, also knew Greece intimately, not only from his travels, but also through his preoccupation with Greek history and literature.
Elisabeth’s love for Greece was well grounded in knowledge of the country’s language, mythology, and history. One of her favorite poets was Lord Byron, probably the best-known foreign participant in the Greek wars of liberty. Elisabeth translated many of Byron’s poems into German, here, too, imitating Heine.
Probably the greatest German-speaking expert on Greece during the 1880s was the Austrian consul on Corfu, Alexander von Warsberg, who was known to the Empress through his books, especially his Odysseische Landschaften (The Landscape of the Odyssey). In 1885, she asked him to be her scholarly guide on her travels in Greece. Before Warsberg’s first audience, Elisabeth’s chief chamberlain advised the writer a little fearfully “that I should keep my statements brief, concentrated; that the Empress could not tolerate much talking. So I was brought before her. She purred at me, curtly, not discourteously; I thought she looked ugly, old, thin as a rail, badly dressed, and I felt that I was looking, not at a foolish woman, but at a mad one, so that I grew truly sad.”
But it was not long before the critical Warsberg changed his mind. For while sightseeing,
the Empress was a changed woman: talkative, informal, clever, quite outstanding, familiar, open-minded—in short, one of the most enchanting creatures I ever met. For four hours I walked next to her or—when the path was too narrow—immediately behind her, and she made me talk ceaselessly, so that by evening my throat was inflamed, and she made the strangest, most honest remarks to me. In any case, an intellectually very advanced nature, which interests me to the utmost degree. She seems aware of her stature and to feel that it justifies her lack of embarrassment. Otherwise it would make no sense for the Emperor to be so considerate to her.24
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