Ich sah im Traume Gauen,
So weit, so reich und schön,
Umspült vom Meer, dem blauen,
Bekränzt von Bergeshöh’n.
Und mitten in den Gauen
Ein hoher Eichbaum stand,
Ehrwürdig anzuschauen,
So alt fast wie sein Land.
Es hatten Sturm und Wetter
Ihm arg schon zugesetzt;
Fast bar war er der Blätter,
Die Rinde rauh, zerfetzt.
Nur seine Krone oben
War noch nicht weggeweht.
Aus dürrem Reis gewoben,
Vergang’ner Pracht Skelett!
Ein Vogel sass dort unten,
“Pechvogel” nennt man ihn,
Wohl, weil sich manche Wunden
Durch seine Schwingen zieh’n.
In Ostnordost da türmte
Die schwarze Wolkenwand,
Von Westen aber stürmte
Ein roter Feuerbrand.
Wie Schwefel schien der Süden,
Denn dort im fahlen Licht
Urplötzlich Blitze glühten
Als naht das Endgericht.
Ich hört den Eichbaum krachen
Bis in sein tiefstes Mark,
Als würde er zerschlagen
Zu seinem eignen Sarg.
Der Baum muss endlich fallen,
Er hat sich überlebt;
Dock für den armen Vogel
Da hat mein Herz gebebt!44
[In a dream I saw territories, / So broad, so rich and handsome, / Lapped by the blue sea, / Rimmed by mountains’ crests. / / And at the center of the territories / Stood a tall oak tree, / Of venerable appearance, / Almost as old as its country. / / Storms and weather / Had already taken their toll; / Almost bare of leaves it was, / Its bark rough and shaggy. / / Only its crown on high / Had not been blown away, / Woven of parched twigs, / Skeleton of former splendor! / / A bird sat there, / “Unlucky” it was called, / Perhaps because many a wound / Has scarred its wings. / / To the east-northeast rose/ The black wall of clouds, / But from the west approached / A red firebrand. / / Like sulfur glowed the south, / For there in the pale light / Lightning flashed abruptly, / As if Judgment Day were drawing nigh. / / I heard the oak tree crack / Down to its deepest marrow, / As if it were being slashed / Into its own coffin. / / The tree must fall at last, / It has outlived its usefulness; / But for the poor bird— / For him my heart trembled!]
Elisabeth saw only too clearly her husband’s bitterness, his “anxious grieving” about the state of the empire in the late 1880s. But she was also the one who consoled him, once again by reassurances about posterity, which would surely mete out justice.
So werden, wenn die Jahre längst entschwunden,
Noch leben Deine Thaten fort und fort;
Dass Du einst warst, wird dankbar nachempfunden,
Und segnen wird Dich noch manch’ betend’ Wort.45
[Thus, when the years have long since vanished, will / Your deeds live on and on still; / That you once lived will be felt with gratitude, / And many a prayer’s word will bless you still.]
To someone who was totally uninvolved, M. C. Marinaki, one of her Greek readers, she confessed during the 1890s, “When I think of him [the Emperor], I am distressed that it is not in my power to help him. But I abhor modern politics and I think it full of deception. It is only a contest in which the most crafty gets the lion’s share, to the detriment of the one who hesitates to act against his conscience. Nowadays nations and individuals can advance only if they are unscrupulous.” 46
She expressed herself in a similar vein to another Greek, Konstantin Christomanos. “And I have too little respect for politics and do not consider it worthy of interest.” She was scathing about the ministers. “Oh, they exist in order to fall; then others take their place,” she said, according to Christomanos, “with a strange tone in her voice that was an inner laugh.” “Anyway, all of it is such self-deception! The politicians believe that they control events and are always surprised by them. Each ministry contains its own fall, from the very first moment. Diplomacy exists only in order to grasp some booty or other from the neighboring states. But whatever happens happens by itself, from internal necessity and ripeness, and the diplomats do no more than take note of the fact.”47
With great circumspection, Elisabeth excepted her husband from her criticism of the Viennese court. She respected him, pitied him, and never included him in the ranks of the Habsburg family and the courtiers. In Elisabeth’s poems, Franz Joseph was also shown for what he truly was: a sovereign of personal integrity, always well intentioned, and dutiful. Even Elisabeth, who knew him better than anyone, could never say anything pejorative of him—nor did she want to.
The imperial office, on the other hand, seemed to Elisabeth nothing but a burden—and a meaningless one at that. For she plainly believed that the imperial and royal monarchy (like every other monarchy) was now little more than “a skeleton of former splendor,” belonging to a time long past and no longer suited to the people of the nineteenth century.
Elisabeth could not wrest anything good even from the technical progress of the age. “People believe that they rule nature and the elements with their ships and express trains. On the contrary—now nature has enslaved mankind. In earlier times, living in secluded valleys which one never left, one felt as a god. Now, globe-trotters, we roll like drops of water in the sea, and in the end we will realize that we are no more than these.”48
*
Her poems, too, reflect Elisabeth’s feeling for nature, her rejection of all that is artificial, all artifacts. By far the majority of the poems are devoted to nature. Even the titles of the two printed volumes—Nordseelieder and Winterlieder—indicate the overwhelming Heine model. Elisabeth wrote that the Master had initiated her into “the mysteries of nature.” Nature became her friend and comforter. There are long poems about Tegernsee and Lake Starnberg within her own borders, the isles of Greece, the North Sea, the forests, the ocean, and the stars, as well as poetic descriptions of an excursion in the mountains near Bad Ischl. Marie Valerie: “the Jainzen really is Mama’s magic mountain, where she writes and dreams and where even I would find it hard to be astonished by anything.”49
The more Elisabeth withdrew into her fantasy life, the more impossible she found it to stay in Vienna. The Hermes Villa in Lainz offered only fleeting respite. More than ever, she sought out solitude, more than ever she felt the pull to Greece. On Corfu, she looked for the peace of mind she could not find in Vienna.
On Corfu, Elisabeth built a castle on a hill by the sea, facing the Albanian mountains. It was completely secluded and invisible from outside, with its own landing stage at the water and its own electrical generator.
An architect from Naples planned the building according to precise instructions from Alexander von Warsberg. It was to be in the Pompeiian style, and the relics from Pompeii and Troy in the Museum of Naples were to serve as models.
Elisabeth dedicated her new castle to Achilles, naming it the Achilleion, “because for me he personifies the Greek soul and the beauty of the landscape and the people. I love him also because he was so fleet of foot. He was strong and willful, despised all kings and traditions, and considered the masses to be unimportant, just good enough to be cut down by death like blades of grass. His own will was the only thing he held sacred, and he lived only for his dreams, and his grief meant more to him than all of life.”50
In the Achilleion, Elisabeth surrounded herself with the busts of the writers and philosophers she worshiped: Homer, Plato, Euripides, Demosthenes, Periander, Lysias, Epicurus, Zeno, Byron, Shakespeare. Apollo and the Muses—copies of statues in museums—were also assigned a place in Elisabeth’s “museum garden.” The walls of the white-marble colonnade were covered with frescoes depicting Greek legends; more statues adorned it. Some of them came from the collection of Prince Borghese. Elisabeth to Christomanos: “he went bankrupt, and so he had to dispose of his gods. You see how terr
ible it is, nowadays even gods are marketable slaves of money.”51 This remark, too, is drawn from Heine’s essay “Die Götter im Exil” (The Gods in Exile).
Franz Matsch, a Viennese painter and student of Makart, painted Achilles Triumphant for the Achilleion. The painting was huge—eight meters long and four meters wide—to fit the stairwell. In his preliminary discussions with the Empress, the painter was astonished at Elisabeth’s thorough knowledge of Schliemann’s excavations of Troy.52 Elisabeth laid down the specifics for the picture in great detail; she wished to have Achilles depicted in a gesture of victory, riding a chariot drawn by horses, dragging behind it the body of Hector, outside the walls of Troy. Matsch also painted the altarpiece for the castle chapel. It represented the Virgin Mary as the patron saint of sailors, on the model of the Stella Maris in Marseilles. The imperial yacht Miramar is also featured in the painting.
Most of the statues were copies of classical works. The furniture, copies of Pompeiian models, was made by Neapolitan craftsmen. Only Franz Joseph’s living quarters made any acknowledgment of the present; here the pieces were modern. “The Emperor does not like Greek furniture,” Elisabeth explained to Countess Sztaray. “He thinks it is uncomfortable, which it really is. But I very much like seeing these nobly shaped objects around me, and since I rarely sit, it does not matter to me whether the chairs are comfortable or uncomfortable.”53
Once again, Elisabeth refused to consider the Austrian economy. She further angered the Viennese by having all these Neapolitan pieces of furniture intended for Greece shipped first (and at further considerable cost) to Vienna and exhibited in the Austrian Museum of Crafts—as models for local crafts, though these had reached a much greater sophistication. The museum director, Eduard Leisching, recalled, “So we were forced to empty out an exhibition hall and show … these unwelcome things, causing consternation and displeasure in the circles of industry and crafts, which were not, at the time, faring very well.”
In Vienna, Elisabeth had never been a zealous museumgoer. But now she came (unannounced, as was her habit), “rapidly crossed the rooms until she arrived at the furniture, praised the pieces, but quickly departed again, remarking that the building was too warm, which she could not tolerate; she would return before long, which, however, she never did.”54
Even before the Achilleion was finished, Elisabeth invited Valerie and her husband, Franz, to Corfu. Valerie was enchanted by the island’s physical charm: “A marvelous spot, and if one knows Mama and knows what she needs in the way of beauty, wonderful climate, and quiet serenity for body and soul, one can only be happy about wonderful Gasturi and this spot [outside it]! From the terrace, Mama showed me the view through two tall, dark cypresses to the open sea, this is the very place where she wants to be buried.”55
Proudly Elisabeth led the young couple to her favorite places. She showed them Ithaca and “the small picturesque bay where Telemachus, greeting the rising sun, washed his hands.” She next took them to Corinth and to Athens, of course, to show them the Acropolis by moonlight.
More than anything, however, she liked being alone in the Achilleion. She greeted each dawn in the colonnade and in the castle garden with her statues of classical deities, dreaming and composing verses. Once when Christomanos also came there around five o’clock in the morning, “she approached rapidly like a black angel charged with defending a paradise” and courteously sent him away. Christomanos: “I left silently; I was startled and as if lost in a dream: I felt as if I had lived the fairy tale of the fair Melusina.”56
Starting in the late 1880s, she no longer allowed her ladies-in-waiting to accompany her on her excursions; generally she chose the company of her Greek readers. Whether traveling in Austria, Hungary, France, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, or elsewhere, she spoke Greek with her companion and had him read to her in Greek. If anyone asked where she came from (for only a very few recognized her), she pretended to be Greek. She justified this answer to Marinaky: “Looked at in the proper light, it is not a lie, for I own property in Greece and could be naturalized.”57 An astonishing remark to come from the Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary and Bohemia!
*
Without wishing it, at the end of the 1880s, Elisabeth found herself trapped in a current political quarrel. It concerned the erection of a memorial to Heine in Düsseldorf. Of course, the Empress promised the committee her support. She donated the major part of the funds needed for the planned memorial, which was to take the form of a Lorelei fountain. According to the statement of accounts, she contributed 12,950 marks to the Berlin sculptor Ernst Herter (who also made the large statue of Hermes in Lainz and the Dying Achilles for Corfu, at a cost of 24,000 marks each).58
Elisabeth’s open commitment to Heine turned into a public scandal and a huge public commotion at a time when anti-Semitism was in virulent eruption. For the decision to erect a monument to Heine, a Jew, the creator of the Wintermärchen (A Winter’s Tale) and critic of German princes, was considered an outrage by both the anti-Semites and the German nationalists and monarchists. There were newspaper campaigns and public demonstrations against the memorial. Elisabeth found herself linked to the “slaves of the Jews” and attacked along with them.
At an anti-Semitic meeting (“Jews Forbidden Entry”), for example, the leader of the All-German Party, Georg Ritter von Schönerer, denounced the “subversion of pure German essence, German traits, and German customs” and included both Crown Prince Rudolf (because of his connections with the “Jewish press”) and Empress Elisabeth in his tirade. He did not, of course, name names, but it was plain enough who was meant when he spoke of the “most decisive factors eager to dedicate a monument to the memory of the Jewish author of printed abominations and obscenities.”59
Unverfälschte deutsche Worte (Pure German Words), the newspaper of the All-German Party, excoriated Heine and Heine’s admirers. “Let Jews and those who are enslaved by the Jews rave about this shameless Jew; we Germans turn from him with loathing and call out to all our racial comrades: Here you see how the Jew thinks, how all of Jewry takes his part, how they beat the drums for him and how, sadly, some Germans also march to the beat of this Jewish drum.”
Because of press censorship, the newspaper could not attack the Empress directly. It printed an editorial vituperating against the “liberal Jewish press,” for “drawing even a most highly placed lady into its agitation.” Thus, though in roundabout ways (which every newspaper reader of the day understood), Elisabeth was ranked among those “enslaved by the Jews.”60
Even without mentioning names, the following sentence amounted to a reprimand of the Empress. “Is there not enough hardship and misery in Vienna, in Austria, not enough people who are hungry and cold through no fault of their own, and is caring for them not our first duty as citizens?”61
The French anti-Semite Édouard Drumont, in his La Fin d’un monde, also attacked both Crown Prince Rudolf and Empress Elisabeth for their pro-Semitic attitude. He sharply criticized Elisabeth’s visit to Heine’s sister in Hamburg and quoted at length Heine’s macabre satire of Marie Antoinette, a Habsburg. “Sovereigns and noble lords love the Jews … they have drunk of the secret love potion, they love those who mock them, defame them, and betray them, and they feel nothing but indifference for those who defend them!”62
The liberal newspapers of the monarchy (called “Jewish papers” in anti-Semitic jargon) expressed their gratification at the Empress’s allegedly pro-Semitic attitude. They praised Elisabeth in every way; the chorus included the Vienna Tageblatt, whose editor-in-chief, Moritz Szeps, was one of Crown Prince Rudolf’s closest friends (a fact unknown to the Empress).
But Elisabeth had no intention of actively intervening in the quarrel and joining the battle for tolerance, as Rudolf thought. She avoided all political partisanship, remaining untouched by both the praise and the abuse handed out by the newspapers. She simply did not care what the public thought about the Heine memorial or how her own position was judged. Her relationshi
p to Heine, whatever its form, was a purely personal matter. “The journalists think highly of me for being an admirer of Heine,” she told Christomanos. “They are proud of the fact that I love Heine, but what I love in him is his boundless contempt for his own humanity and the sadness worldly matters inspired in him.”63
Elisabeth withdrew without a struggle. In 1889, she gave up her support of the Heine memorial in Düsseldorf and retired in disgust.
Later, the anti-Semitic newspapers claimed that a strongly worded letter from Bismarck to the Austrian foreign minister had persuaded the Empress to this step. In this letter, Bismarck was said to have pointed out, “courteously but nevertheless very plainly, what an unpleasant impression must have been made on the imperial family by the enthusiasm of Empress Elisabeth for a poet who never had anything but mockery, insults, and scorn for the House of Hohenzollern and the German people.”64 There is no proof for this statement in the diplomatic correspondence, but it does show how much Elisabeth’s private interests were given a political interpretation. Herter’s Heine memorial, intended for the Hofgarten in Düsseldorf, was subsequently erected by German-Americans in New York. It still stands in a small park at 161st Street and Mott Avenue.65
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