Twilight of Empire

by Greg King

  Though The Last Days of Archduke Rudolf contained enough accurate information to suggest a degree of veracity, it also served up a healthy dose of inaccuracies regarding Mary’s journey to Mayerling and events at the lodge. Wolfson’s attempts to dismiss evidence contrary to his theory were likewise unconvincing: He suggested, for example, that officials forced Mitzi Caspar to invent stories of Rudolf’s suicide proposals, while ignoring the crown prince’s repeated overtures to many others.52 Bismarck certainly worried about Rudolf’s accession to the throne, but no compelling evidence has emerged to support the idea that he ordered his assassination.

  The highest-profile claim that Rudolf died as a result of a political assassination, though, came from a seemingly unimpeachable source: Empress Zita, the widow of Austria’s last emperor, Karl I. Zita was born three years after Mayerling, but no one doubted that she knew all the Habsburg secrets. In 1983 the ninety-one-year-old former empress insisted that Rudolf had not committed suicide but instead had been murdered as part of an international conspiracy against Franz Josef.53 According to this the French, not the Germans, were behind Rudolf’s death. The future French prime minister Georges Clemenceau supposedly approached Rudolf with a plan to stage a coup against his father, so that once on the throne the new emperor could sever the alliance with Germany and form a pact with the French Republic. Zita claimed that Rudolf refused to act in so dishonorable a fashion, and that Clemenceau then arranged for his assassination.54

  On its face this seems absurd. That Rudolf admired France was no secret. “We are indebted to France,” he wrote to Szeps, “as the source of all liberal ideas and constitutions in Europe. And whenever great ideas begin to ferment, France will be looked to for an example. What is Germany compared to her? Nothing but an enormously enlarged Prussian regimental barbarism, a purely militaristic state.”55 Rudolf’s friendship with the Prince of Wales also influenced his friendly views toward France. An idea grew that if Austria severed its alliance with Germany, it would then be free to tie itself to both Great Britain and France; Germany would thus be encircled and contained. To this end Szeps even arranged a secret meeting between Rudolf and Clemenceau in December 1886, at which the potential realignment was discussed.56

  Erich Feigl’s 1989 biography of Empress Zita fleshed out this extraordinary claim of French involvement. The Habsburg loyalist wrote that the former empress insisted she’d learned details of the plot from Rudolf’s sisters, Gisela and Marie Valerie: According to this, Cornelius Hertz, a Jewish banker, had led the French assassination squad.57 She even declared that Franz Josef knew all but had said, “I could not act in any other way. The monarchy was at stake. The truth would have shaken the foundations of the Empire. Everything will be published after my death. Then poor Rudolf will be entirely rehabilitated.”58

  No such publication ever took place, though in 1983 Zita promised that she’d soon release secret family documents confirming her tale.59 But when the historian Gordon Brook-Shepherd attempted to pursue this pledge, the former empress backpedaled and changed her story. “Alas,” she wrote to him, “all proofs, that is documentary proofs, have either disappeared or cannot be found.” Instead she insisted that the Christian burial Rudolf received proved that the Vatican knew he had been murdered.60

  Empress Zita died in 1989. No evidence supporting her claim has ever surfaced. Although convinced that she genuinely believed her story, the former empress’s family expressed embarrassment and bewilderment at her allegations. Her eldest son, the late Archduke Otto, even gently refuted his mother’s allegations in public interviews.61 Many regarded Zita as a woman of great integrity who would never have descended to gossip; unfortunately, in her last decade, she was given to any number of questionable statements, and it seems most likely that she later conflated stories she had heard about the Hungarian conspiracy and embellished them with her own prejudices. For the staunchly Catholic Zita, Rudolf’s suicide was anathema, a blemish on the house of Habsburg. It is likely no coincidence that her claim coincided with the onset of an ultimately successful campaign to see her husband, Karl, beatified by the Catholic Church as a man who sought peace during World War I.62

  The war, in fact, likely also explains the former empress’s zeal to blame Clemenceau for Rudolf’s death. In 1917, without consulting his ally Germany, Emperor Karl asked Zita’s brother Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma to enter into secret negotiations with France over a separate peace. In the spring of 1918, the Austrian foreign minister, Count Ottokar von Czernin, unaware of the emperor’s overtures, attacked Prime Minister Clemenceau for refusing to end the war. Furious, Clemenceau revealed Karl’s overtures; when Germany protested, Karl lied, saying he had never authorized his brother-in-law to negotiate with the French. Clemenceau produced the documents, and revelation of the affair, which left Karl dishonored and Austria weakened, which undoubtedly fueled the revolution that autumn that drove the Habsburgs from their throne. Zita never forgot this humiliation. It is difficult not to believe that her claims against Clemenceau ultimately stemmed from lingering personal animosity.

  Stories of Rudolf’s political assassination remain popular in Mayerling literature. Aside from lack of proof, most share similar dismissals of all contrary evidence: The suicide letters are deemed forgeries; Rudolf’s previous declarations of suicide are put down to coercion of witnesses after the fact; and the differing times of death for Rudolf and Mary are questioned or ignored. These assertions soon amass a wealth of contradictions, implausible scenarios, and claims of vast conspiracies that put the imperial court’s efforts at a cover-up to shame. Like tales that Rudolf was killed by blows from a Champagne bottle or shot by a jealous forester, it is surely no accident that many stemmed from Rudolf’s descendants, members of the Habsburg family, or from former courtiers—those most determined to rescue his memory and proclaim him innocent of murder and suicide.

  PART IV

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A century has transformed the bloody scene at Mayerling into romantic tragedy: star-crossed lovers who preferred death together than to be parted by cold unfeeling propriety. The story has been replayed countless times, in histories and in novels, in movies and musicals, and through ballet. For too long, rumor has displaced fact. The time has come to rend the veil of gauzy romanticism and bizarre conspiracies, revealing—as much as is possible—the byzantine truth that led to tragedy.

  In the end evidence suggests that only two people were responsible for the events at Mayerling: Rudolf and Mary. Yet exactly what took place between them behind that locked bedroom door can never truly be known. From the distance of more than a century, both emerge as deeply flawed, emotionally damaged, high-strung, and desperate actors. But the question of motive remains: What drove Rudolf and Mary to such a tragic end? Did they, as sentimental historians suggest, find the idea of life without each other simply too much to bear? Or did Rudolf and Mary die for reasons that may have had no connection to each other? A new look suggests a far more plausible—and ultimately more shocking—scenario surrounding Mayerling.

  “There is no doubt,” Queen Victoria wrote of Rudolf after Mayerling, “that the poor Crown Prince was quite off his head.”1 The official declaration of mental instability likely stemmed from religious expediency, but few doubted that Rudolf had been a deeply disturbed man. The question of just how disturbed he may have been—and what role this played in his ultimate end—has long plagued history. But new analysis suggests some startling possibilities.

  Generations of incestuous marriages brought physical and mental infirmities to Rudolf’s ancestors. “With us,” his cousin Archduke Franz Ferdinand once complained, “man and wife are always related to each other twenty times over. The result is that half of the children are idiots or epileptics.”2 The archduke wasn’t exaggerating. Rudolf’s parents were first cousins; his grandmothers were sisters; and Franz Josef and Elisabeth shared the same grandfather in King Maximilian I Josef of Bavaria.3 The crown prince’s genealogical tables, as his official
biographer Baron Oskar von Mitis so delicately phrased it, revealed “a scarcity of ancestors.”4

  The Habsburg inheritance was not untroubled. Emperor Ferdinand I has often been described as “an epileptic idiot,” a man who “could hardly put two sentences together,” while his sister Archduchess Marie displayed signs of mental instability.5 Varying degrees of eccentricity exhibited themselves in Rudolf’s paternal relatives: His uncle Ludwig Viktor haunted Vienna’s bathhouses to seduce young male soldiers and liked to be photographed in elaborate ball gowns; Archduke Karl Ludwig, an otherwise sober and serious uncle, had a reputation as a religious fanatic who terrorized his third wife, Maria Theresa. And Rudolf’s favorite cousin, Archduke Otto, was an overt sadist who delighted in torturing both animals and the soldiers in his regiment.6

  Stephanie’s memoirs deemed Rudolf “more of a Wittelsbach than a Habsburg. He was clever, indeed brilliant, highly cultivated, with a broad, generous mind. He was as sensitive as his mother. He was impulsive, mercurial, highly strung. He had terrific outbursts of temper, moods.”7 This Bavarian heritage was particularly troubling. King Maximilian I Josef’s brilliant but highly eccentric son King Ludwig I lost his throne over his stunningly indiscreet liaison with the notorious dancer Lola Montez; Ludwig’s sister Alexandra went through life believing she had once swallowed a piano made of glass. The king’s grandson Prince Otto was declared insane in 1878 and spent the rest of his life locked away in a castle, howling at imaginary voices, tearing apart his food, and smashing flies against the windows.8

  Then there was King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Empress Elisabeth’s unfortunate second cousin. He’d come to the throne at the age of eighteen, tall, handsome, and decidedly odd, envisioning himself as a hero in one of the Wagner operas he so loved. After a disastrous engagement to Elisabeth’s sister Sophie ended in 1867, the homosexual king flung himself into a world of nocturnal fantasies, building his famed castles, picnicking in the snow, holding conversations with phantoms, and cavorting with handsome young soldiers. His delusions led the Bavarian government to depose him as insane in 1886; a day later Ludwig’s body was found floating in an alpine lake along with that of his doctor, the former monarch apparently having drowned his keeper and then himself rather than endure life locked away like his brother Otto.9

  Finally, of course, there was Empress Elisabeth. Her paternal grandfather, Duke Pius, had been feebleminded and lived in isolation; after marrying his second cousin Ludovika, Elisabeth’s father, Duke Max in Bavaria, grew noticeably eccentric. Of Max and Ludovika’s children, the eldest son, Ludwig—Marie Larisch’s father—was a recluse with a reputation for restlessness, while daughters Elisabeth and her sisters Helene, Sophie, Marie, and Mathilde all suffered from serious depression, feelings of persecution, and occasionally erratic behavior.10

  As Baron von Mitis noted in his biography of the crown prince:

  What effect, if any, this genetic inheritance may have had on Rudolf remains a mystery, but there is no denying the accumulated psychological and physical forces that, by the beginning of 1889, led him to tragedy.

  The profound incentive to his actions was not formed by one single motive. A mass of personal irritations and tragic associations of a higher order, which were often inter-related, fostered the germination of a seed, which was already biologically present in his being. The unbearable burden of the whole dragged him down to the depth of life and made him covet death. Each individual of the component causes might seem to a cool observer hardly sufficient in itself to destroy the joy of living but in a sick mind and all being united they can develop the lurking consent to death until only the moment of release is needed to stage the last scene of the tragedy.11

  Rudolf had always been psychologically fragile, subject to anxiety and depression. Franz Josef was too preoccupied with the business of ruling, too consumed with exalted conceptions of his role, too emotionally aloof, and too judgmental to offer his son any real guidance or affection, and his disapproval likely fueled in Rudolf a sense that he was a disappointment. Rudolf was two when his mother first fled Vienna, and she was frequently absent for months thereafter. When Elisabeth did appear, she was often battling Rudolf’s grandmother Archduchess Sophie, tearing the young boy’s affections in differing directions. Although he idolized Elisabeth, she was too elusive a presence to provide Rudolf with the love and acceptance he craved. His forced separation at six from his sister Gisela and his nanny undermined any stability, while the empress’s obvious favoritism toward Marie Valerie likely reinforced Rudolf’s sense of inadequacy and resentment.12 The educational regime instituted by Gondrecourt was physically and emotionally abusive, and the trauma manifested itself in Rudolf’s persistent bed-wetting, wild mood swings, and nightmares.

  Early on Rudolf developed an unhealthy fascination with death. When his grandmother Archduchess Sophie died in 1872, he insisted on hearing every detail of her last moments over and over again. Walking through a park one day, he saw a man drink caustic soda and die in agony; Rudolf was so obsessed with the episode that for days he talked of little else.13 He also showed a tendency to aggression, not only when denied something but also in his artwork. Childish drawings and paintings of dead animals, decapitated heads, and men dueling—with splotches of crimson vividly slashed into the wounds—suggest a propensity toward violent thoughts.14 Marie Festetics remembered how even as a child Rudolf compulsively shot bullfinches from his window. “Every creature that breathes or has wings is doomed to death,” she wrote, adding that Rudolf had “become possessed by a sort of lust for killing.”15 This wasn’t a passing fancy: Rudolf had a disconcerting and dangerous habit of waving his guns around—in 1878 he’d accidentally shot himself in the hand.16 And, shortly before his wedding, Rudolf amused himself by having caged animals set loose in the palace courtyard so that he could cold-bloodedly shoot them down.17 Yet no one seems to have expressed any concern over his obsessive behavior.

  A journal entry Rudolf wrote at the age of fifteen is telling: “Thoughts of all kinds race through my head; it seems confused, all day long my brain boils and toils the whole day long; one goes out, another comes in, and each possess me, each tells me something different, sometimes serene and happy, sometimes black as a raven, full of fury; they fight and from the struggle truth slowly develops.”18 Retrospective analysis is a tricky and inexact thing, but some evidence suggests that Rudolf may have suffered from Bipolar I disorder; his mention of racing thoughts is indicative of a manic episode, one of the symptoms usually attributed to the disorder. Others include depressive episodes; grandiosity; restlessness; irritability; aggression; paranoia; pronounced decrease in sleep; reckless personal and sexual behavior; and increased suicidal thoughts. Rudolf displayed elements of all these symptoms throughout his life.19

  Rudolf’s sense of political impotence gnawed away at his self-esteem and left him depressed: Neither his father, government officials, nor his extended family took him seriously. His constant complaints of being ignored and excluded likely emphasized Rudolf’s sense of despair.20 When, on his thirtieth birthday, he wrote to Szeps of his “empty” life, his growing frustration, and his increasing weariness at “waiting for great times of reform,” Rudolf gave vent to the suppressed hostility raging within.21 Repeated exclusion from the Army High Command conferences, his clashes with Archduke Albrecht, and his father’s request that he resign his post as inspector general of the infantry fell on Rudolf as personal and professional failures, leaving him humiliated. The death of the liberal German emperor Friedrich III tore at Rudolf’s hopes for the future; the persistent attacks in the German press that autumn of 1888 shamed the crown prince by presenting him as the disreputable “other,” an unbalanced man unfit for the Habsburg throne.22 In the last months of his life Rudolf isolated himself from former friends and lost interest in writing, hunting, and scientific pursuits.

  At the beginning of 1889 a new outbreak of gonorrhea left his eyes infected and added to the crown prince’s depression.23 The painful sympt
oms came and went without warning, fueling Rudolf’s escalating spiral into alcoholism and drug addiction. Suffering from insomnia, headaches, and joint pains, Rudolf grew thin and pale, his face ashen, his restless eyes rimmed with dark circles. The regimen of Champagne, Cognac, and morphine not only rendered his behavior increasingly unstable but also took a toll on Rudolf’s sense of masculinity by frequently leaving him impotent. It is impossible to verify what precisely Rudolf was told about his disease, but with his tendency to hypochondria and overreaction, he may have feared that he was infected with syphilis. This would have been a death sentence, the shameful idea of gradual madness preying on a mind already burdened with emotional turmoil.24 After Mayerling, Queen Elisabeth of Romania hinted at this in a letter to Stephanie, writing, “I think that he himself, being a man of outstanding intelligence, saw the approach of destruction and despairingly flung himself into the abyss, hastily seizing all life could give him before the night came.”25

  Stephanie chronicled the “nervous unrest,” “violent temper,” and “complete mental decay” that characterized Rudolf’s final years.26 His mind was filled with grandiose ideas for the future, but his inability to put them into practice left him restless and irritable. Although the trait had been present since childhood, in the last years of Rudolf’s life Stephanie, Marie Larisch, Empress Elisabeth, and Marie Valerie, among others, all noted his hostile demeanor. Soon after their marriage Stephanie recalled that, while her husband often kept late hours, he was always ready for work the next morning; in the last few months of his life he was sleeping only four or five hours a night—another sign of possible Bipolar I disorder.27

  And Rudolf was increasingly reckless in the last year of his life. There was the 1888 incident in which he nearly shot his father, and the numerous occasions on which he appeared intoxicated in public and had to be quickly rescued by anxious courtiers before he caused a scandal. Then there was Rudolf’s sexual behavior. Not only did he indiscriminately bed any number of women, sometimes fathering their children, but he was careless enough to pick up a case of gonorrhea and then infect his wife with the disease. By 1889 his private life was in a shambles, his marriage existed only in name, and Rudolf had few intimates with whom he could share his disappointments.