by Greg King
Nor was Rudolf discreet. One evening he and Stephanie attended a dinner party given by her sister Louise and her husband, Prince Philipp of Coburg. “There was naturally much gossip current in Vienna about the liaison that existed between Rudolf and Mary Vetsera,” Louise recalled. “I was not afraid to mention this delicate subject to Rudolf, and I expressed my hopes that the gossip was exaggerated.” Yet, with Stephanie sitting across the table from him, Rudolf quietly pulled out a cigarette case and opened it for Louise: Within he’d placed a miniature of Mary Vetsera. Louise was horrified—not that Rudolf had acted so brazenly but because he had done so “with the servants present.”66
On December 11, 1888, Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle opened with a performance of Das Rheingold at the Imperial Opera House; claiming that she hated Wagner, Mary excused herself from joining her mother and sister. Instead she waited until they left for the opera and then slipped out of her mother’s house. Bratfisch waited in a fiacre around the corner and took her to see Rudolf at Schönbrunn, the Habsburg summer palace on the outskirts of Vienna.67 She repeated this ploy on December 17 and again four days later, when Bratfisch delivered her to the Hofburg.68 It was the last time the lovers met that year. When they reunited a month later, the affair would take an ominous, ultimately fatal turn.
CHAPTER SIX
On August 21, 1888—in the midst of his affair with Mary Vetsera—Rudolf had turned thirty. “The age of thirty marks a dividing point in life,” he had written to a friend, “and one that is not too pleasant, either. Much time has passed, spent more or less usefully, but empty as far as real acts and successes are concerned. We are living in a time of slow, drawn-out rottenness.… Each year makes me older, less fresh, and less efficient.… And this eternal preparing of oneself, this constant waiting for great times of reform, wears out one’s creative power.… However, I must believe in the future. I hope and count on the next ten years.”1
Three days earlier Rudolf had suffered through a stifling charade of familial happiness when Franz Josef celebrated his fifty-eighth birthday at Bad Ischl. With his graying, bushy whiskers and mustache, the emperor personified the unchanging traditions his son despised; unable to contain his irritation, Rudolf offended everyone by denouncing his father’s beloved alpine resort as “a frightful hole.”2 The empire’s crown prince was tired of waiting—waiting for his father’s approval, waiting for a meaningful role, waiting for a change in the country’s cautious, conservative politics. On the morning of his own birthday Rudolf gave vent to long-simmering frustrations with a gesture of contempt, shaving off his beard and leaving only a long mustache modeled on those worn by Hungarian hussars.3 The rebellious meaning was clear: Rudolf had broken with his father, with his conservative politics, and with Austria.
This rebellion had been long in coming. Great hopes burdened Rudolf’s thin shoulders. He would be “a Habsburg philosopher on the throne,” the “head of all modern thought,” someone who would use his “striking intellectual gifts and unusual abilities” to fundamentally transform his father’s archaic empire.4 “He knew,” insisted a courtier, “that his father’s policy of hesitation and half measures could be pernicious to the monarchy,” and wanted “to open wide the firmly closed windows of the Imperial Palace and let in bright, refreshing air.”5 Viewing intellectuals and a prosperous middle class as guarantors of the empire’s survival, Rudolf entertained himself with visions of breaking Vienna’s centralized power in favor of increased regional and ethnic autonomy. He rebelled against anything that smacked of conservatism or carried a whiff of religious influence, and summed up this mood in his first will, written in April 1879: “I have trodden a different path from that of most of my relations, but always from the purest motives. Our age requires new points of view. Everywhere, especially in Austria, there is reaction, which is the first step toward a downfall. Those who preach reaction are the most dangerous enemies.”6
Among those “dangerous enemies” was Franz Josef’s prime minister, Count Eduard von Taaffe, who held the post from 1879 to 1893. Taaffe hailed from an Irish family that had immigrated to Austria during the Thirty Years’ War and served at court and in the military. The emperor had known him since childhood, when the two boys often played together; Taaffe was the only person outside the imperial family allowed to call the emperor by his first name, though he was rigidly correct, addressing him publicly as “Your Majesty.”7 Taaffe walked a fine line between mild reform and reactionary repression. “Muddling along in the old rut,” was how one wit characterized the prime minister’s opportunistic program of granting illusory autonomy to competing nationalities to keep them dependent on the throne.8 This brought temporary stability but at a price: Taaffe ruthlessly crushed opposition and unwelcome hints of liberalism: In his first year as prime minister, 635 newspapers alone were seized and destroyed.9
“Taaffe’s manure heap,” Rudolf called the prime minister’s political alliances, composed of “crafty schemers” filled with “fanaticism, delusion, stupidity, infinite cunning, lack of principle, every unpatriotic feeling, Jesuit adroitness and boundless lust for power.”10 In December 1881 Rudolf had boldly given his father a twenty-page memorandum outlining the dangers he perceived in Taaffe’s policies and asked that the prime minister be removed from office.11 “I can see plainly the slope down which we are slipping backwards,” he had confided to Latour von Thurmberg; “I am intimately connected with affairs but can do absolutely nothing; I may not even speak up to express my feelings and beliefs.” Taaffe, he complained, did not “even admit my right to hold an independent opinion,” and dismissed him as “insolent and a rebel.” His father’s attitudes—“clerical, intransigent, distrustful”—led Rudolf to fear for the future. The memorandum, he insisted, contained “nothing of rebellion: it is not the voice of one who desires the limelight but is the voice of distress, giving counsel.… Will the Emperor take this little work seriously, or will he just glance through it in the evening before retiring and lay it in a file, taking it as the eccentricity of a dreamer?”12
As Rudolf had feared, Franz Josef did not even bother to acknowledge his son’s memorandum. Rudolf fought back. His network of friends and advisers included not only professors and philosophers but also radicals and his father’s political opponents. Now he used his friendship with Moritz Szeps, the Jewish editor of the popular liberal newspaper Neues Wiener Tagblatt, to advance his own agenda. Rudolf had first met Szeps in 1880; intrigued by the editor’s liberal ideas, he began writing anonymous articles for the newspaper critical of the empire’s policies and foreign alliances. This didn’t remain a secret for long: Rudolf’s every move was shadowed. “They are becoming very watchful and suspicious of me,” he confided to Szeps, “and every day I see more clearly the narrow circle of espionage, denunciations and supervision surrounding me.”13
Rudolf had a tendency toward paranoia, but in this case his fears were well founded. One particularly watchful enemy was his own great-uncle Archduke Albrecht, Inspector General of the Imperial and Royal Armed Forces. Humorless and deeply conservative, he regarded it as a sacred duty to preserve Habsburg honor and prestige.14 Rudolf had a prickly relationship with the elderly archduke: Albrecht, the crown prince complained to his cousin Franz Ferdinand, “loves poking his nose about, picking quarrels, intriguing, and doing harm, for he is malicious.”15 Rudolf soon learned that Albrecht was actively spying on him, intercepting most of his correspondence and forwarding it to the emperor. “All journalists,” Albrecht warned Franz Josef, “are Jews conspiring against man’s most sacred heritage”; Szeps, “a thief and a swindler,” was filling the crown prince’s head with untenable political notions.16
Officialdom retaliated: To silence Rudolf, the government closed Szeps’s newspaper. “We have embarked on a catastrophic policy and it seems that no one can alter it now,” Rudolf complained. “We are being driven into darkness by fate, and it’s partly the work of the Jesuits, who are closely connected with all the most influential members of the
Imperial Family.”17 In 1885 a mob led by Georg von Schönerer, head of the anti-Semitic German National Party, broke into the offices of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, vandalized equipment, and beat the employees. Szeps was actually found guilty of having libeled Schönerer and spent several months in prison. Rudolf felt responsible: When Szeps was released, the crown prince gave his friend money to found a new newspaper, the Wiener Tagblatt, in which he continued to promote his liberal ideas.18
“In Austria,” Rudolf complained, “I belong to the least informed group.”19 He was pointedly “excluded from all political information”; the lowest chamberlain at court, he believed, “has a wider influence on activities than do I. I am condemned to idleness.”20 Franz Josef tried to appease his son by ordering Austria’s foreign minister, Count Gustav Kálnoky, and the departmental head of the Ministry of the Royal Household and of Foreign Affairs for Hungary, Ladislaus von Szögyény-Marich, to begin briefing his heir on the empire’s foreign policies.21 He also named Rudolf inspector general of the infantry in early 1888. But neither effort succeeded. Rudolf indiscreetly began sharing confidential political information with Szeps and others in his circle, and diplomatic secrets leaked out and appeared in the pages of Vienna’s newspapers. When word of this inevitably got back to the Hofburg, Franz Josef ordered that his ministers were to brief his son only on minor issues and provide him with outdated documents.22 And Rudolf’s post as inspector general of the infantry carried no power, only demands that he attend reviews and visit regiments: It was busywork, meant to occupy his time and keep him out of trouble.23 This much Rudolf learned when his father barred him from military councils and refused him any say in important decisions.24
Franz Josef never understood his son or appreciated his talents, which were considerable. In 1878, working with the economist Karl Menger, Rudolf had produced a provocative—and anonymously published—critique of Austria’s aristocrats, deriding their idleness and deeming them frivolous hedonists unfit to serve whether as army officers or as high government officials.25 Rudolf was able to put his name to the 1883 publication of Fifteen Days on the Danube, an engaging chronicle of one of his hunting expeditions, which won him an honorary doctorate from Vienna University.26 In 1884 he published an account of his 1881 journey to the Middle East, in which he more fully displayed a gifted literary style, but he soon turned his attention inward, producing the first part of a multivolume encyclopedic work, Die Österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild (The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Words and Pictures), meant to chronicle his father’s empire. Franz Josef was so surprised by the erudite tone of his son’s introduction that he insultingly asked if Rudolf had really written the words.27
Rudolf’s complaint was that of royal heirs the world over: lack of a “proper” job. Queen Victoria, disappointed in her eldest son’s wayward behavior, refused to allow the Prince of Wales any meaningful role, while in Prussia the elderly Kaiser Wilhelm I clung tenaciously to his throne as his ambitious, liberal-minded heir, Friedrich Wilhelm, languished in the shadows of power even as cancer consumed him. A life of indolence, with Rudolf reduced to the role of decorative prop at his father’s court, stretched out before the crown prince.28 His own belief in the providential nature of his position made Franz Josef temperamentally unsuited to share power, and he expected his heir to conform to and support his ideas. But father and son were poles apart when it came to their political views: Rudolf’s embrace of liberalism, though born of conviction, seemed a personal affront, a rejection of all that the emperor believed and held dear. Franz Josef had treated his brother Maximilian in much the same way. “My individuality,” the archduke once declared, “does not fit the views of my older brother; he lets me feel this on every occasion in a most unequivocal, inconsiderate and insulting manner.”29
“The Emperor,” Latour von Thurmberg complained, “could have intervened most successfully if he had kept the Crown Prince’s mind occupied, initiated him into the business of government, and made him play his part. Serious, productive work would have taken up the whole of the Crown Prince’s time.”30 Latour von Thurmberg, though, was being too optimistic. Although Rudolf posed as a deep-thinking intellectual, his political convictions were often rashly formed and poorly considered. He had vision and talent, but he was too impatient and never appreciated his father’s steadfast approach—born of experience—to political issues. Rudolf wanted immediate change. While promoting himself as an enlightened prince seeking equality, he could not see beyond the narrow scope of preserving Habsburg rule as necessary for the empire’s continuation. In publicly agitating against his father, and by sharing sensitive political and diplomatic information, Rudolf destroyed his father’s trust and undermined Franz Josef’s one attempt to involve his son in governmental affairs.
Rudolf remained a man without power or influence. Heir to one of Europe’s oldest royal dynasties, he was forbidden to exercise his intellect or explore his political ideas. Convinced that nothing would change, that he was—until his father died—condemned to a twilight world as a passive onlooker, Rudolf grew embittered and sank into depression. Temporarily reunited with her mercurial husband on a joint visit to Sarajevo in the summer of 1888, Stephanie saw “an alarming change” in Rudolf: “It was not only that he was more restless and distraught than before,” she wrote. “In addition he had become prone to outbursts of fierce anger upon the most trifling occasions. I had long become accustomed to the fact that the conventionalities of our life together as husband and wife, especially as our relationship found expression in his letters, contrasted glaringly with Rudolf’s actual everyday behavior. Now however he was often quite unrecognizable. His inward disorganization led to terrible attacks of wrath, to intolerable and undignified scenes. It was as if, with the loss of inward stability, he had also lost any sense of good form. On such occasions he would not hesitate to talk to me openly about his distasteful amours.”31
It wasn’t just an embittered wife who noticed the change. A few months earlier Marie Valerie had confided to her diary: “Rudolf stares at us, particularly at Mama and me, with glances of such deep and bitter hate that one is overcome with a feeling of anxiety. Even Gisela, whose sober views certainly don’t lend themselves to imagination and whose love for Rudolf tends always to embellish his behavior, confessed … she was frightened herself by his stare and eventually all three of us broke out in tears.… This odd, unexplainable hatred of Rudolf’s casts a dark shadow over our future.”32
A growing sense of menace now surrounded Rudolf. Restless and irritable, he rarely slept more than four or five hours a night.33 Headaches, painful joints, and eye infections—symptoms of his gonorrhea—recurred with uncomfortable regularity.34 Rudolf was now giving himself half-gram injections of morphine several times a day; when his court physician, Hermann Widerhofer, suggested that he cut the amount to a quarter gram, Rudolf ignored him and actually increased the dosage.35 He was also downing copious amounts of Cognac and Champagne until drunk; more than once members of his suite had to intervene and whisk the crown prince away from some ceremony before he caused a scandal.36
Rudolf’s life spiraled into chaos that autumn of 1888. There had been no invitation to attend the spring Army High Command conference, and he was excluded from the autumn meeting as well.37 Frustrated, Rudolf submitted a report to his father suggesting military reforms; Franz Josef passed it on to Archduke Albrecht, who in his reply derided the crown prince’s ideas as attempts to “make up” for his own “deficiencies” as inspector general of the infantry.38
An incident that autumn reinforced Rudolf’s sense of despair. He’d once placed great hopes on the accession of his Prussian counterpart, the liberal Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, envisioning a time after Franz Josef’s death when together they could reshape European politics. Unfortunately fate intervened. When old Kaiser Wilhelm I died in 1888 and his son took the throne as Friedrich III, the new emperor was already dying of throat cancer. After a reign of just three months, Friedr
ich’s premature death placed his son on the German throne as Wilhelm II. Rudolf had long despised the brash, militaristic new kaiser, and the feeling was mutual. Rudolf, Wilhelm rather hypocritically complained, “did not take religion at all seriously and it pained me when he poured out his mordant wit not only on the church and clergy but also on the simple faith of the country folk.”39
Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Vienna that October of 1888. During a routine military inspection he belittled Rudolf’s infantry and complained that their newly adopted Mannlicher rifles were unfit for use in any armed conflict. As the head of Austria-Hungary’s principal military ally, the kaiser wanted Rudolf stripped of his position as inspector general. Unwilling to provoke the volatile young kaiser, Franz Josef gave in and asked his son to resign. Rudolf angrily refused.40 Soon a spate of unflattering articles highly critical of Rudolf began appearing in the German press. There were veiled references to an unnamed “august personage” in Austria who not only hated Germans and Germany but who was also leading a remarkably dissolute life—charges picked up and reprinted in certain French and Italian journals. True to form, Rudolf fired back, anonymously writing anti-Prussian articles for the Wiener Tagblatt and for a new Austrian journal, Schwarz-Gelb (Yellow-Black), which he helped fund.41 Rudolf also let his friend Moritz Szeps know that the young kaiser was then embroiled in an affair with an Austrian woman of dubious reputation, who had stolen Wilhelm’s monogrammed cuff links as proof. If the attacks in the German papers didn’t stop, Rudolf suggested, Szeps should publish the damning information about Wilhelm II.42