by Greg King
Franz Josef could never reconcile himself to the fact that his nephew Franz Ferdinand was now heir and stood in Rudolf’s place. A few days after Mayerling the emperor received his nephew: “I shall never be told officially whether or not I am Heir to the Throne,” Franz Ferdinand complained after the meeting. “It’s as if this stupidity of Mayerling was my fault! I have never been treated so coldly.”14 True to form, the emperor made the same mistakes with the archduke that he had made with the crown prince, attempting to deny him a useful role and keeping him as ignorant as possible about governmental affairs. Some of this antipathy undoubtedly stemmed from the archduke’s morganatic marriage in 1900 to Countess Sophie Chotek, which—like Stephanie’s second marriage—he regarded as an insult to the dignity of the house of Habsburg; ironically Stephanie became one of the couple’s few friends in the imperial family. But Franz Ferdinand proved himself a much stronger character than his cousin Rudolf, and through sheer will and hard work eventually forced the emperor to allow him a substantial role.
In the summer of 1914, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie visited Sarajevo. Twenty-six-years earlier Rudolf and Stephanie had come to the Bosnian city amid worries of possible assassination. The parallels between 1888 and 1914 were eerie: Like Rudolf and Stephanie, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie stayed at the Hotel Bosna in the nearby resort of Ilidže; they followed their footsteps in touring Sarajevo and shopping in its fabled bazaars. But unlike Rudolf and Stephanie, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie didn’t leave the city alive: An assassin’s bullets finally opened the floodgates to a general European war. The old emperor carried on for two miserable years, but on November 21, 1916, he finally succumbed to pneumonia at the age of eighty-six. His great-nephew, who assumed the throne as Karl I, was more generously inclined toward Stephanie: In 1917 he raised her husband, Elemér Lónyay, to the rank of hereditary prince. But a year later the empire crumbled away: Karl and Zita fled into exile, and Stephanie lost the annual stipend that had enabled her comfortable style of life. By 1921, bereft of funds, the former crown princess was reduced to opening a cinema in Budapest.15
Stephanie remained estranged from her daughter, who, in the aftermath of the monarchy’s fall, took up her father’s political interests and joined the Social Democratic Party, falling in love with the politician Leopold Petznek. In 1924 Elisabeth formally separated from her husband, and Prince Windisch-Grätz unsuccessfully battled her for custody amidst gleeful newspaper headlines. She did not, though, seek a divorce: Petznek was married, although his wife was confined in an asylum; mirroring her father’s romantic indiscretions, Elisabeth bought a house in Vienna, where she lived openly with her lover, attending political rallies and marches at his side.16
In 1935 Stephanie published her memoirs, Ich Sollte Kaiserin Werden, translated into English the next year under the title I Was to Be Empress. Written with an aristocratic couple, this was a fairly straightforward look back on her marriage to the crown prince, though undoubtedly it was meant to elicit sympathy for the wronged wife. Stephanie still felt wounded and humiliated by her life with Rudolf; her book carried a certain strain of animosity, though it was not as embittered as many of Rudolf’s biographers would insist. Countess Juliana von Stockhausen, one of her ghostwriters, recalled that Stephanie was “torn between a desire to tell the truth and a reluctance to make these matters public.”17 But the book, depicting a dangerously unbalanced Rudolf, was deemed too frank, and Erzsi managed to have it banned in Austria; Stephanie retaliated by cutting Elisabeth out of her will.18 Not that Stephanie was above resorting to such tactics when it suited her. In 1935 she learned that the director Anatole Litvak was filming an adaptation of Claude Anet’s melodramatic 1930 novel Mayerling, starring Charles Boyer as Rudolf and Danielle Darrieux as Mary Vetsera. Stephanie immediately objected, and somehow persuaded authorities in both Austria and her native Belgium to ban the motion picture.19
Stephanie and her husband continued to live at Schloss Oroszvár as Europe again erupted into war. But the advance of the Soviet army in 1945 forced them to flee, and they sought refuge at the Benedictine Abbey of Pannonhalma in western Hungary. It was there on August 23, 1945, that Stephanie died; her husband followed her to the grave less than a year later. Both are buried at Pannonhalma.
Nor did Elisabeth escape the trauma of World War II. In 1944, the Nazis arrested Petznek and sent him to Dachau concentration camp near Munich, where he remained until the end of the war. His wife had died in 1935, but only in 1948 did Elisabeth finally divorce Prince Otto Windisch-Grätz and marry Petznek. During the Soviet occupation of Vienna she had lost her villa, and was not able to return to it until 1955. After she formally renounced her titles, people referred to Elisabeth as “the Red Archduchess” in recognition of her less-than-conservative political views and work. Petznek died in 1956, and Elisabeth in 1963: At her request she was buried in an unmarked grave in Vienna. Her four children—Rudolf’s grandchildren—are now all deceased as well: Prince Rudolf died in 1939, and Prince Ernst in 1952. Prince Franz Josef, the eldest, remained alive until 1981, while his sister, Princess Stephanie, died in 2005 at the age of ninety-five.
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Fate was not kind to many of those closest to the Mayerling tragedy. Stephanie’s sister Louise endured her miserable marriage to Prince Philipp of Coburg until 1895, when she met a young Croatian officer, Count Géza Mattacic, in the Prater. Louise was something less than discreet about the liaison, and her unconventional behavior resulted in Franz Josef barring her from the imperial court. Outraged friends persuaded Prince Philipp to challenge Mattacic to a highly unsuccessful duel, during which the young soldier fired his revolver into the air while Coburg missed his shot. Having failed to dispose of the impudent officer, Coburg soon claimed that Mattacic had been forging Stephanie’s name to her sister’s bills; authorities arrested him and sentenced him to six years in prison. At the same time Louise was confronted with a choice: Either she return to her husband or be committed to an asylum. She chose the latter, where authorities acting under imperial orders declared her insane. Public pressure won Mattacic’s release in 1902, and he soon managed to rescue Louise from the asylum and spirit her out of the empire. In 1906 Louise finally won her divorce from Coburg, but Mattacic died prematurely and thereafter she lived a peripatetic, impoverished existence, pointedly ignored by her relatives—including her sister Stephanie—until her death in 1924.20 Prince Philipp, Rudolf’s great friend, brother-in-law, and hunting companion, died in 1921.
Complicity in her cousin Rudolf’s affair with Mary Vetsera condemned Countess Marie Larisch to exile from the Viennese court. Abandoning the socially damaged Heinrich Baltazzi, she transferred her affections to Karl Ernst von Otto-Kreckwitz and, in 1894, gave birth to his son, Friedrich Karl; with his wife’s social connections demolished, Georg von Larisch was no longer willing to tolerate Marie’s indiscretions, and he finally divorced her in 1896. A mere year passed before Larisch abandoned Otto-Kreckwitz and wed the musician Otto Brucks. This union, too, proved unsuccessful: Brucks found that being married to the infamous Countess Marie Larisch brought no rewards, and he soon became an alcoholic. With her bank coffers empty, Marie began writing about her Habsburg relations; in 1897 Franz Josef gave her a substantial sum of money in exchange for the manuscript about a subject he wanted forgotten.21 Then, in 1909, her son, Heinrich Georg, killed himself, having learned about his mother’s involvement in Mayerling and questions about his paternity. Larisch was bent on revenge. In 1913, working with the British writer Maude Ffoulkes, Larisch published her memoirs, My Past. Like the booklet by Helene Vetsera, this was largely meant to rewrite history, in this case revising Larisch’s actual knowledge of and role in her cousin’s affair. If Helene Vetsera had pointed the finger of blame at Larisch, the countess now returned the favor, insisting that Mary’s mother had actually known of the liaison from its start. The book was an entertaining if highly questionable rendering of Larisch’s involvement in the Mayerling affair, in which she denounced the “tiss
ue of lies woven around me.”22 She railed against those she believed had wronged her, including the emperor, whom she described as “that stupid old man in Vienna.”23
Brucks died in 1914; after working as a nurse during World War I, Larisch again turned her attention to her Habsburg past. Learning that the German director Rolf Raffé was making a film about Empress Elisabeth, the “elegantly dressed Countess” appeared unannounced at his Munich studio and offered to tell him “my own theory on the secret—or perhaps I should say, mystery—of Mayerling, and the deaths and burials of Crown Prince Rudolf and Baroness Vetsera, which would not disappoint.” Intrigued, Raffé hired Larisch to help with a Mayerling screenplay; until the project was developed, though—and sensing that he had a potential dramatic coup—he asked Larisch to star as herself in his film on the empress. Kaiserin Elisabeth von Österreich duly premiered in 1921 but is now unfortunately lost. Lost as well is whatever “theory” Larisch may have propounded about Mayerling. Not until 1928 did Raffé get around to filming the story in his Shicksal derer von Habsburg (The Fate of the Habsburgs), which had an unlikely Mary Vetsera in the person of the future Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. But Shicksal derer von Habsburg, too, no longer exists—not even an outline to give a hint as to what Larisch might have said.24
By the time the film finally appeared, though, Larisch had already left Europe. Perpetually short of money, she embarked on a third marriage with an American doctor in 1924, but this union, too, turned miserable, and she left him, working as a maid in New Jersey before returning to her native Germany, where she died impoverished in 1940 at the age of eighty-two, having outlived four of her five children. But she achieved an immortality of sorts apart from Mayerling when her friend T. S. Eliot worked her into his great poem The Waste Land.
A few days after the tragedy at Mayerling, Rudolf’s friend and frequent hunting companion Count Josef Hoyos had an audience with Franz Josef, in which he generously offered to say that he had accidentally shot the crown prince in a hunting accident—an offer the emperor declined.25 Stephanie never blamed Hoyos for her husband’s misadventures or death: Two weeks after Mayerling, she wrote to the count, thanking him for his “true and sincere friendship, both in happiness as well as in sorrow” and asking that he “only recall the happy days” he had spent with “my beloved Rudolf.”26 Shortly after Rudolf’s death Hoyos wrote a lengthy memorandum recording his experiences at the lodge and deposited it in the Imperial Haus, Hof-und Staatsarchiv in Vienna, where it lay forgotten for nearly forty years. Hoyos died in 1899.
Josef Bratfisch kept his silence until his death in 1892 from throat cancer. Johann Loschek, too, refused all offers of interviews, though before he died in 1932 he dictated his memoirs to his son. At the time Loschek likely didn’t know that Count Hoyos had also left a written record or that it would soon be published; believing that he was the last eyewitness to the tragedy, Loschek thus made numerous claims at variance both with the known facts as well as the count’s contemporaneous memoirs.27 Perhaps some of these discrepancies could be put down to the passage of time, but Julius Schuldes, the former telegraph operator at Mayerling, believed that Loschek’s main intention was to “put himself in a favorable light” and “push himself to the forefront of events” while attempting to refute suspicions about his own actions at the lodge that night.28 Rather than throw light on events at Mayerling, Loschek’s statement only served to further muddy the historical waters.
Rudolf’s friend Moritz Szeps died in 1908. In 1891 Mitzi Caspar sold the house Rudolf had bought her in the Heumühlgasse and lived in some comfort for the rest of her life. She refused to speak about her affair with Rudolf, and destroyed his last letter to her before her death.29 Her death in January 1907 has often been attributed to spinal disease, but in fact she died of syphilis.30
Despite her battles with the imperial court and government censorship, Helene Vetsera remained in Vienna after publishing her monograph on Mary’s liaison with the crown prince. So too did her Baltazzi brothers. In 1890, Franz Josef worried when, amid much publicity, Katharina Schratt joined Alexander Baltazzi for a ride in a hot-air balloon. “I have never objected,” he wrote her, “to your social relations with Alexander Baltazzi,” but added that, “in the eyes of a wicked world this fact, picked out by the press, will harm you.”31 Alexander Baltazzi died in 1914, as did his brother Aristide; Hector Baltazzi died in 1916, while Heinrich lived until 1929.
As for Helene Vetsera, smart society in Vienna followed the imperial court’s lead, and the once-brilliant hostess faded into obscurity. She left the palace on the Salesianergasse for the less-imposing surroundings of an apartment on Vienna’s Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, living in the lengthening shadow of the shame heaped upon her. Mary’s sister, Hanna, married a Dutch aristocrat, Count Hendrik von Bylandt-Rheydt, but she died unexpectedly of typhoid after suffering a miscarriage in 1901.32 World War I claimed Mary’s younger brother, Franz, who died in 1915 while fighting with the Austrian cavalry on the Russian front. Helene thus survived all of her children. Postwar inflation in Vienna wiped out her remaining fortune, and she ended her days in a small Vienna apartment. It was there, on February 1, 1925, that she died at the age of seventy-seven; Helene was buried with Franz at Payerbach. It has been said that before her death she destroyed her personal papers related to Mayerling.33 In fact the letters written by Mary were deposited in a Vienna bank vault, where they remained hidden until being discovered in 2015.
Today Rudolf rests in an elaborate brass-bronze-and-copper sarcophagus in Vienna’s Capuchin Crypt, next to his parents, with Franz Josef at the center flanked by his wife and his son. Rudolf’s death inadvertently precipitated tumultuous events: the assassination of his cousin Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, World War I, and the fall of Europe’s great ruling dynasties. A certain nostalgia has developed around Rudolf’s modern legacy, depicting him as a liberal visionary of exceptional intellect and talent, a man who could have transformed the Habsburg monarchy and perhaps saved it when Europe’s other royal dynasties crumbled into oblivion. This view seems too naively hopeful. Rudolf undoubtedly had a better grasp of democratic aspirations and the necessity of reform than did his father, but he was too impetuous, too impatient, to advance a considered political program for the future. Had he lived, Rudolf would likely have lingered on the fringes of power, impotent to act and feeling oppressed by his father’s unimaginative rule.
Rudolf would have been fifty-eight when his father died in 1916. The better part of his life would have been over, and the endless waiting would almost certainly have made him even more bitter and depressed. But by the age of thirty he was already spiraling into self-destruction. He would undoubtedly have fallen further into drug and alcohol abuse to combat the effects of gonorrhea, and his physical and mental health would have deteriorated further. Even without the intervening events of January 1889, it seems unlikely that Rudolf would have managed to hold himself together for another twenty-seven years until his father’s passing. The late Archduke Otto concisely summed up the crown prince: “A wasted life,” he said, “followed by a needless death.”34
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In Graham Greene’s 1950 novel The Third Man, the unnamed narrator presciently notes, “One’s file, you know, is never quite complete; a case is never really closed, even after a century, when all the participants are dead.”35 As ever in the case of momentous tragedies, the apparent confusion surrounding Mayerling gave rise to conflicting theories that transformed events that night into the ultimate locked-room mystery, shrouded in seemingly impenetrable layers of rumors. The facts—if not the motivating factors—were simple enough, but by depriving its people of the devastating truth, the government needlessly fed the sense of intrigue and left itself open to charges of a vast conspiracy.
Even after a century the fallen Habsburgs still hold a sentimental place in modern Austria. The story of Mayerling, along with a series of highly idealized movies about Empress Elisabeth, has transformed Franz Josef’s fami
ly into cultural icons. Tourists flock to view the rooms where they lived, to see the empress’s lavish gowns, and to immerse themselves in a fairy-tale world of royalty and confections, of gilded palaces and elegant uniforms, set in the imagination to the evocative strains of a romantic Strauss waltz.
After Rudolf’s death his Turkish room in the Hofburg remained intact, but it was dismantled after the fall of the monarchy. Just beyond it, the narrow wooden ascent that Mary had often used to visit her lover is still known as the Vetsera Staircase.36 Today these rooms house government offices and are closed to the public, though morbid curiosity can be satisfied with a visit to the Hofmobiliendepot, or Court Furniture Museum, where the bed upon which Rudolf and Mary died remains a prime attraction.
The Vetsera Palace on the Salesianergasse was for a time occupied by the princely Salm family, though it was razed in 1921.37 But tourists enamored of the Mayerling story can journey a dozen miles southwest of the capital. At Heiligenkreuz, Mary Vetsera’s grave still draws crowds, who come to stare at the little plot enclosed by a low wrought-iron fence and the marble monument recording her name.
Having come this far into the Vienna Woods, tourists almost inevitably travel a few more miles to see Mayerling itself. Less than a month after Rudolf’s death, Franz Josef took control of the lodge and ordered that it be transformed into a convent for an order of penitential Carmelite nuns. The old Church of Saint Laurenz was pulled down and the area around the lodge transformed with the addition of new wings encircling the courtyard.38