(New Directions in German Studies, 22) Maura E. Hametz (Editor), Heidi Schlipphacke (Editor) - Sissi's World - The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth-Bloomsbury Academic (2018)

NEW DIRECTIONS IN GERMAN STUDIES
Vol. 22
Series Editor:
Imke Meyer
Editorial Board:
Katherine Arens, Roswitha Burwick, Richard Eldridge,
Erika Fischer-Lichte, Catriona MacLeod, Stephan Schindler,
Heidi Schlipphacke, Ulrich Schönherr, Andrew Webber,
Silke-Maria Weineck, David Wellbery, Sabine Wilke,
John Zilcosky
Volumes in the series:
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by Edgar Landgraf
Vol. 2. The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter
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Vol. 3. Citation and Precedent: Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and
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Vol. 4. Beyond Discontent: “Sublimation” from Goethe to Lacan
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Vol. 6. Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé
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Vol. 11. The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory
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Vol. 15. Goethe’s Families of the Heart
by Susan E. Gustafson
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edited by J. D. Mininger and Jason Michael Peck
Vol. 17. Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe
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Vol. 18. Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies,
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edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone
Vol. 19. Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature,
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by Curtis Swope
Vol. 20. Ghostwriting: W. G. Sebald’s Poetics of History
by Richard T. Gray
Vol. 21. Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler’s Prose: Five Psycho-Sociological
Readings
by Marie Kolkenbrock
Vol. 22. Sissi’s World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth
edited by Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke
Sissi’s World
The Empress Elisabeth in Memory
and Myth
Edited by
Maura E. Hametz and
Heidi Schlipphacke
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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Dedicated to women everywhere who, like Sissi, wish to shape
their own images and then leave them behind.
Contents
List of Illustrations x
Acknowledgments xiii
1 Introduction: “Sissi”: The Convergence of Memory and Myth

Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke 1
Memory and Myth 3
Elisabeth/Sissi and Nostalgia 12
Sissi in North America? 20
PART I MEMORY
2 Encounters: Ulrike Truger, Elisabeth—Zwang—

Flucht—Freiheit, 1998/99
Christiane Hertel 29
Dreiansichtigkeit35
“Placement Problems” (“Platz-Probleme”) 38
In-Between47
3 The Remains of the Stay: The Corporeal Archive of Empress

Elisabeth in the Hofburg
Beth Ann Muellner 53
Presence: Theme, Layout, and Nostalgia’s Tendencies 60
Abstraction: Stepping Back to Consider Scale 67
Absence: The Case of the Missing Corset, Ghosting, and
Post-Museum Nostalgia 70
Conclusion77
4 Sisi Redux: The Empress Elisabeth and Her Cult in Post-

Communist Hungary
Judith Szapor and András Lénárt 81
Introduction81
The Hungarian Cult of Elisabeth in Her Life and Death 83
Act One of the Sisi Revival: The Forgotten 1980s 89
viii Contents
How the Habsburgs Demolished the Iron Curtain 92

The Sisi Industry: Historians and the Resurrection of the
Elisabeth Myth 94
A New Site for the Sisi Cult: The Gödöllő Royal Palace Museum 95
Conclusion: Sisi the Avatar 98
5 A Place for Sissi in Trieste

Maura E. Hametz and Borut Klabjan 103
Death of the Empress 104
The Statue in the Habsburg Port 107
Cold War Hibernation 114
New Central Europe 117
Sissi at the Millennium 123
Conclusion127
6 Empress Elisabeth and the Painting of Modern Life

Olivia Gruber Florek 131
7 Karl Lagerfeld and the Elisabeth Myth

Carolin Maikler (Translated by Marieanne Gilliat-Smith) 155
ΑΧΙΛΛΕΙΟΝ · ACHELLEIO · L’ACHILLEION159
Reincarnation168
8 Sissi, the Chinese Princess: A Timely and Versatile Post-Mao

Icon
Fei-Hsien Wang and Ke-chin Hsia 181
“We Want to See Sissi!” 181
Sissi Came to China and Became Xixi 183
The Indispensable Sissi/Xixi: Narrating the History of the
Habsburg Lands in China 191
Sissi/Xixi Sells: Brand Power and Fantasies 198
The Chinese Princess Xixi 208
PART II MYTH
9 Melancholy Empress: Queering Empire in Ernst

Marischka’s Sissi Films
Heidi Schlipphacke 215
10 Sisi: A Double Reflection on a “Queer Icon”

Susanne Hochreiter 247
Sisi, Sissi, Lissi, Elisabeth: Queer Parody 247
Sisi-Sissi: Parody, Camp, and Queer Performance 253
“Sissi!” “Franz!” 256
Sisi-Elisabeth. Or the Imperial Allegory of Queer 260
In-Visibility, Secrets, Queer 263
Contents ix
11 Imagining Austria: Myths of “Sisi” and National Identity in

Lilian Faschinger’s Wiener Passion
Anita McChesney 275
12 Cocteau’s Queen: Sissi Between Legend, Spectacle, and

History in L’Aigle à deux têtes
Elizabeth Black 301
Introduction301
Rejecting Royal Spectacle 304
Becoming a Tragedy, or Choosing Text Over Image 307
Cinematic Spectacle 310
History and Film 314
Conclusion320
13 Fat, Thin, Sad: Victoria, Sissi, Diana and the

Fate of Wax Queens
Kate Thomas 323
Barbara Cartland’s Sissi 330
Thomas Hardy’s Sissi 338
Wax Queens 342
Princess Au Revoir347
Returning to Tears 350
14 Sisi in the Museum: Exhibits in Vienna and the US

Susanne Kelley 355
Sisi in Vienna 358
Sisi in the United States 365
Notes on Contributors 375

Index 382
List of Illustrations
Figure 2.1: Ulrike Truger, Elisabeth—Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit,

1998–1999, Wien, Karlsplatz: Zwang. Courtesy of ARS
New York and Ulrike Truger. 30
1998–1999, Wien, Karlsplatz: Freiheit. Courtesy of ARS
1998–1999, Wien, Karlsplatz: Flucht. Courtesy of ARS
Figure 2.4: Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Maria Theresa as
Queen of Hungary, 1766, Wien, Unteres Belvedere. 46
Figure 4.1: Gödöllő Palace, Hungary: Empty Sisi dress. 99
Figure 5.1: Civici Musei di Trieste, “Elisabetta” in 1912. 112
Figure 6.1: Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Emperor Franz Joseph
of Austria, 1865, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. 132
Figure 6.2: Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Empress Elisabeth
of Austria, 1865, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. 133
Figure 6.3: Amethyst Album, carte de visite album from
Empress Elisabeth’s personal collection, ca. 1862–1864,
Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Photo Credit: © Rheinisches
Bildarchiv Köln. 135
Figure 6.4: Amethyst Album, carte de visite reproductions
of Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Empress Eugénie Surrounded
by her Ladies-in-Waiting and Florinda, Miethke & Wawra
List of Illustrations xi
Photographische-Artistische Anstalt, Wien, ca. 1856–64,

page 1 of the Amethyst Album, Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Photo Credit: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln. 136
Figure 6.5: Unknown photographer, Mlle. Armande and
Zou Zou, cartes de visite on page 7 of the Amethyst Album,
ca. 1862–1864. Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Photo Credit:
© Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln. 137
Figure 6.6: Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Emperor Napoléon III
of France, 1853, oil on canvas copy of lost painting by
Winterhalter, Chateaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo
Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. 146
Figure 6.7: Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Empress Eugénie of France,
1853, oil on canvas, Chateaux de Versailles et de Trianon.
Photo Credit: RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. 146
Figure 7.1: Karl Lagerfeld, Reincarnation (film): Lagerfeld’s
Winterhalter Sisi 1. 171
Figure 7.2: Karl Lagerfeld, Reincarnation (film): Sisi and
Franz dance. 172
Figure 7.3: Karl Lagerfeld, Reincarnation (film): Lagerfeld’s
Winterhalter Sisi 2. 173
Figure 8.1: Advertisement for Sissi Sanitary Napkins. “Once you
try, you will love it for the rest of your life,” reads the large-
font caption, http://www.nipic.com/show/11214882.html
(image captured on June 5, 2017). 200
Figure 8.2: “Cici Princess,” a promotional sample from the
wedding photography studio Qiqihaer Shihualuo gaoduan
sheying gongdi (Qiqihaer Swarovski High-End Photo Palace).
http://www.wed114.cn/photo/a253410.html (image
captured on June 4, 2017). 201
Figure 8.3: Official website of Xixi Gongzhu/SISSI PRINCESS,
http://www.sissiok.com/Product/list-3–0.html (image
captured on June 4, 2017). 203
Figure 8.4: “Princess Xixi Breast Augmentation” webpage,
http://www.csrlzx.com/zt/fengxiong/(image captured on
June 4, 2017). 205
Figure 8.5: Dingxiu Meiquan Hotel, the facade:
http://meiquanhotel.com/index/index.html
(image captured on June 5, 2017). 206
xii List of Illustrations
Figure 8.6: Dingxiu Meiquan Hotel’s official Weibo account:

http://www.weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show?
id=2309404094228648057024 (accessed on June 5, 2017). 207
Figure 9.1: Ernst Marischka, Sissi (film): Sissi feeds the caged
birds at Possenhofen. 224
Figure 9.2: Marischka, The Fateful Years of an Empress (film):
Sissi’s sickbed in Madeira. 228
Figure 9.3: Ralf König, Prall aus dem Leben. Courtesy of
Ralf König. 230
Figure 9.4: Marischka, The Fateful Years of an Empress (film):
Franz Joseph at his desk. 234
Figure 9.5: Marischka, The Young Empress (film): final tableau
in Hungary. 241
Figure 12.1: Cocteau, The Eagle Has Two Heads (film):
Body and image: the queen and King touch. 312
Out of place: the queen in the model town. 313
The queen as Winterhalter’s Sisi. 315
Acknowledgments
Our debts are many and cannot possibly be sufficiently acknowledged,

but we would nonetheless like to extend our thanks and appreciation
to everyone who helped to bring this collection to publication. From
the day we learned of our mutual fascination with Sissi, based on our
office accoutrements including Heidi’s Sissi Barbie doll and Maura’s
tea tins and magnets, we have imagined this project coming to fruition.
We have received assistance and encouragement from many quarters to
help us in the quest to explain the Elisabeth phenomenon and to define
Sissimania.
Deep thanks go to Imke Meyer and the editors at Bloomsbury for
their enthusiastic reception of the project and their interest in including
the work in the New Directions in German Studies series. Haaris Naqvi
and Katherine De Chant at Bloomsbury offered gracious and patient
assistance, guiding us through the publication process. For permission
to an image from his book Prall aus dem Leben, we would like to thank
the genius comic book author Ralf König. We are deeply indebted to the
brilliant sculptural artist Ulrike Truger, who was excited about our pro-
ject from the beginning and generously allowed us to use images of her
enigmatic and fascinating “Elisabeth” sculpture for the book. Oxford
University Press graciously allowed us to reprint Heidi Schlipphacke’s
essay that originally appeared in Screen, a research project that contrib-
uted to the initial impetus for the book.
Colleagues and friends far and wide have inspired us and helped
us through the various stages of production of the manuscript. As we
have found out along the way, everyone (secretly?) loves Sissi, and this
has spurred us on to realize the project. We were unbelievably lucky to
collect a truly exciting group of contributors for this volume from both
sides of the Atlantic with areas of expertise spanning art history, litera-
ture, film, history, fashion, and popular culture, all with a soft spot for
the Empress. It was a great treat when many of us came together under
the auspices of the Austrian Studies Association conference in Chicago
xiv Acknowledgments
in Spring 2017 to share our research and talk “Sissi.” We also owe a
debt of gratitude to those colleagues on whom we relied for anony-
mous reviews of the articles included in the collection. Carl Good, with
his keen eye for detail and wizardry with formatting and editing notes,
was a godsend at the end.
Our institutions provided funding support at critical moments. The
Institute for the Humanities and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
at the University of Illinois at Chicago offered generous support for
summer travel crucial to research for the book at its early stages. The
Department of History at Old Dominion University provided much
needed assistance to help defray costs for the inclusion of images in
the book.
Without the support of our families this work would not have been
possible. This project has been a labor of love, and its period of pro-
duction included a marriage and children moving on to high school
and to college. To our spouses, Todd and Imke: we thank you for your
brilliant interventions into the questions we explored while working on
the book, for your unending patience, and for enduring the presence
of the ever-persistent Sissi. As with Romy Schneider, Sissi stuck to us
like cream of wheat! Jonathan and Zachary, who provided necessary
distractions and grounding during the project, inspire us with the hope
for what gender relations can be in the future.
One Introduction: “Sissi”:
The Convergence of Memory
and Myth
Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke
“The record of every human creature must contain both light and
shadow,” wrote Count Egon Corti in the preface to Elizabeth, Empress of
Austria, the hagiographic biography he wrote in 1934 under the title Elis-
abeth, “die seltsame Frau.” Trying to capture the character of the “uncom-
mon” or “odd” woman, he referred to the equally hagiographical
description by Elisabeth’s lady in waiting Countess Fürstenberg, who
sought to explain Elisabeth’s elusive and alluring beauty, writing, “Nei-
ther chisel nor brush can depict her as she really was, or that something
about her which had such power to attract and captivate, for it was a
thing peculiar to herself. She will live on in legend, not in history …”1
And in the nearly 120 years since her death, this remark has proved
prescient. The Empress Elisabeth has lived on in memory and in myth
and has retained her status as a symbol of beauty, grace, elegance, roy-
alty, tragedy, romance, and even kitsch around the world. This collec-
tion explores the contemporary fascination with the Habsburg Empress
and seeks to investigate why the Empress’s popularity has endured and
why her image continues to resonate across diverse cultures. In fact,
the chisel, the brush, the screen, the web, and even modern cityscapes
offer reminders of the iconic Sissi and the legend of the Empress Elis-
abeth. From the gaiety and naïve beauty of Sissi captured on the silver
screen by Romy Schneider in the ever-popular Sissi films of the 1950s
to the solidly material, white, and mysterious Sisi sculpted in stone by
1 Egon Corti, Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, trans. Catherine Alison Phillips (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936), preface. The original was published in
German: Egon Corti, Elisabeth: “die seltsame Frau” (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1934).
2 Sissi’s World
contemporary artist Ulrike Truger,2 the image of the Empress Elisabeth

is both ubiquitous and ephemeral. Indeed, Sissi continues to be a cult
figure inspiring “Sissimania” around the world.
The confusion and uncertainty surrounding the identity of the
Empress even extends to debates over what she should be called. Sissi,
the sobriquet used in this volume’s title Sissi’s World, is consciously
chosen as an indication of the centrality of Ernst Marischka’s 1950s
cinematic depiction of the Empress to the construction of contempo-
rary memory and visions of Elisabeth. However, since the Habsburg
Empress appears in different contexts, periods, and places under a vari-
ety of names, each important in its disciplinary, artistic, cultural, or geo-
graphic context, each of the authors who contributed to this collection
has chosen an appellation for particular reasons. The Empress figures
in a variety of guises, among them Elisabeth, Elizabeth, Erzsébet, Sisi,
Sissi, and Xixi. Some authors are quite specific in their use of a par-
ticular designation, like Susanne Hochreiter, who uses “Sisi” to refer
to the discursive figure and “Elisabeth” to refer to the historic figure.
Others name her according to sources, context, or circumstances. Like-
wise, other royal names, have been left to the convention chosen by the
contributor (for example, Franz Josef or Francis Joseph).
The variety, range, and sheer volume of popular representations
of the Empress demonstrate the worldwide fascination with her and
reveal the paradoxes of her life, recalling contradictory perceptions of
her image and reputation after her death, as she is remembered and
constructed as an historical figure and as a legend. Yet little scholarly
work has been dedicated to exploring the ways in which the Habsburg
Empress is remembered and imagined, embodied and disembodied,
recalled, revered, and constructed. What might be termed “Sissima-
nia,” the Sisi cult, or the Sisi phenomenon is evident even to the casual
observer, but the study of its evolution and significance is nearly absent
from scholarship. The articles collected in this volume explore the ways
in which Sissi is remembered and represented and try to explain her
relevance and longevity as a mythic, iconic figure in contemporary cul-
tures around the world. A secondary impetus for the book, reflecting in
particular the editors’ experiences and perspectives as Americans, is to
ask why the Empress, who generates such intense emotions and is wor-
shipped around the globe, does not appear to resonate in North Amer-
ican culture and why she remains little known in the United States,
despite American audiences’ fascination with royals and the royal life-
style. What, we ask, inoculates Americans against Sissimania?
2 Ulrike Truger’s “Elisabeth” statue stands in the Lainzer Tiergarten at the Her-
mesvilla in Vienna.
“Sissi”: The Convergence of Memory and Myth 3
Memory and Myth

The memory of Elisabeth springs from narratives about the Empress’s
personal life as well as the mythical status of the Habsburg monar-
chy, in particular as represented in images of the emperor. Ancient
Roman and early Christian traditions of veneration and mythic
authority were cultivated from the consolidation of Habsburg impe-
rial rule in the sixteenth century.3 The royal family also forms part
of the national myth of the modern state of Austria, a “lieux de
memoir,” a space mapped at the foundations of the nation that has
been explored extensively by scholars since the publication of Pierre
Nora’s seminal work on France.4 Emil Brix, Ernst Bruckmüller, and
Hannes Stekel’s edited three-volume work Memoria Austriae, pub-
lished in 2004 and 2005, sets the tone for these perceptions of the
monarchy, particularly in the first volume on Austrian national
identity dedicated to Men, Myth, and Times.5 Brix, Bruckmüller,
and Stekel’s grounding of Habsburg images in this conception of
national identity points to another reason for Elisabeth’s elusiveness
in scholarship—the tendency to equate royalty with the power of
male state authority. Admittedly, Elisabeth was the royal consort,
and her claim to royal power lay in her marriage to the emperor; yet
such a perspective is certainly based on the common association in
the existing scholarship of men and maleness with political power.
Elisabeth was the Empress and, as such, played a public role and
faced considerable expectations to carry out the duties assigned to
the ruling house. Yet she generally appears as merely a side note in
historical accounts of the monarchy.6
The explanation for the veneration of and popular fascination with
the Empress very likely resides in the interplay of myth and memory. She
purportedly became involved in politics only once during the crisis with
Hungary, but even this one presumed engagement has fed accounts of the
Empress that underscore her feminine appeal. Narratives of the political
vignette usually ground her ability to influence politics in her personal
3 On associations of the Habsburg emperors with ancient Roman, Hebraic,

and Christian authority and classical iconography see Marie Tanner, The Last
Descendant of Aeneas: the Habsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
4 Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).
5 Emil Brix, Ernst Bruckmüller, and Hannes Stekel, Memoria Austriae, vol. 1, Men-
schen, Mythen, Zeiten (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 2004).
6 Pieter M. Judson’s magisterial The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), tends to focus on the institutions and
lands of the monarchy rather than the royal house and its members. Hence,
Elisabeth, as consort, receives little attention.
4 Sissi’s World
charisma.7 Memory (as holding a direct link to a past truth) and myth (as
a distortion of the past) converge in the cultural work of “remembering”
the Empress Elisabeth and identifying the source of her charisma.
On the surface, the concepts of memory and myth seem at odds with
one another, but as Maurice Halbwachs argues in his seminal work
On Collective Memory, all memory is collective—it is shaped and rein-
forced through the social framework in which the individual lives. In
this sense, “[…] everything seems to indicate that the past is not pre-
served but is reconstructed on the basis of the present.”8 Charisma, too,
relies on the collective and on notions of authority constructed around
an individual. While Max Weber places charisma in the framework of
a patriarchal structure, he insists that “charisma knows no formal and
regulated appointment or dismissal.”9 To possess charisma, the indi-
vidual must hold extraordinary personal qualities, but those qualities
must likewise be validated by a group or community.10 So the question
arises: how do we explain the phenomenon of Elisabeth, the particular
combination of charisma and memory she embodies that has produced
such a malleable and yet tenacious and ubiquitous Elisabeth myth?
It is a generally accepted idea in our post-postmodern age that tem-
poral and spatial contingency are integral to the reshaping and recon-
struction of collective memory, but this idea bears emphasizing in light
of reflections on the repeated reconstruction of “Sissi” in diverse epochs
and national and regional spaces. Halbwachs’s On Collective Memory,
published in 1952, might very well have been influenced by Walter
Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written in 1940 and
published in France in 1947, a work highlighting Benjamin’s messianic
understanding of history as a concept that is only made meaningful
through a vivid encounter with the present. Benjamin’s critique of his-
toricism is central to the analyses of reconstructions and appropriations
of Elisabeth contained in this volume. As Benjamin writes, “To artic-
ulate the past historically does not mean to recognize the past ‘as it
7 The legacy of this veneration in the Hungarian context forms an aspect of the
analysis in Judith Szapor and András Lénárt’s essay in this volume. Elisabeth’s
image in this respect is romanticized in fictionalized accounts including Allison
Pataki, The Accidental Empress (New York: Howard Books, 2015).
8 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 40.
9 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guen-
ther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978),
1112.
10 Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi explore Weber’s conception of charisma
in their introduction to Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in
Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2010), 4–6.
really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up

in a moment of danger.”11 Benjamin implicates the historians who re
present past events and figures as if they were eternal and unchanging,
comprehensible to each culture and epoch without consideration of the
constraints of the present. He draws a link between the contingency
of history and “fashion,” which always has “a flair for the topical, no
matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago.”12
Memory, history, and the present meld in Benjamin’s reflections on
our understanding of historical events and figures, and his conception
of time reminds us to view multiple iterations of “Sissi” across temporal
and geographical borders similarly as “costumes” evoking the past in
order to capture the Zeitgeist of the present. The essays in this volume
reveal the preponderance of the present in such diverse reincarnations
of “Elisabetta,” the Sissi statue in Trieste’s Liberty Square, discussed by
Maura Hametz and Borut Klabjan, and Karl Lagerfeld’s fashion homage
to Elisabeth in the 2014 film Reincarnation, as explored by Carolin Mai-
kler.13 Each cultural product borrows from the past in order to reflect on
the present. Each harnesses collective memory to make “social usage,”14
as Roland Barthes writes about the function of myth, of Elisabeth and
to legitimize the present, harkening back to tradition to cement new
narratives in the cultural imaginary.
Clearly, memory and myth are intertwined, as Halbwachs points
out, as each not only recollects but also distorts the past. This distor-
tion, the product of a “wish to introduce greater coherence,” seeps into
understandings of the past that are harnessed to create a harmonious
present.15 Barthes’s understanding of myth also emphasizes the link-
ages between memory and myth, a point that is salient for our analy-
sis of Sissi’s many afterlives. For Barthes, myth in the bourgeois world
distorts but does not completely suppress its historical origins: “How-
ever paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to dis-
tort, not make disappear.”16 Myth is “a type of speech […] a mode of
11 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 257.
12 Benjamin, Illuminations, 263.
13 Karl Lagerfeld, Reincarnation, with Pharrell Williams, Cara Delevingne, Geral-
dine Chaplin, Lady Amanda Harlech, Baptiste Giabiconi, Heidi Mount, Caroline
Lebar, et al. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO4-TV6Zckc
(accessed November 2, 2017).
14 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang,
1972), 109.
15 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 182–3. This conception of memory is similar to that
of myth as analyzed critically by thinkers like Roland Barthes in Mythologies and Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Max Horkheimer
and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
16 Barthes, Mythologies, 121.
6 Sissi’s World
signification, a form” that is “not defined by the object of its message,

but by the way in which it utters this message.”17 The historical mean-
ing is an “instantaneous reserve of history, a tamed richness” that can
be called forth at will to produce an artificial naturalization of the object
of representation.18
Barthes argues that myth in the bourgeois age represents history
as Nature, and we are invited to read essentialism or a truth into the
myth due to its recourse to a domesticated (impoverished) history.19 For
example, for Barthes, the hair or full beard on the face of the popular
Abbé Pierre, member of the French Resistance during the Nazi occu-
pation of France, is linked in a complex relation of semiotics to the
charitable characteristics of the historical figure Pierre who was seen
as representing the soul of the nation; in this instance, History becomes
Nature (hair/truth).20 In contrast to representations of evil beardless fig-
ures, Pierre and other venerated bearded priests are not just symbols
of masculinity but also of a visceral naturalness, organically linked to
the earth and to lived communities outside the confines of the Church.
Barthes’s example of Abbé Pierre’s hair recalls the overcoded ico-
nography of Elisabeth’s unruly locks in multiple representations. The
Empress’s hair features prominently in Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s
alluring portraits of her, capturing intimate moments uncharacteristic
of depictions of royalty. Here is the “visceral naturalness” described
by Barthes, captured in enduring depictions of Elisabeth that seem
to offer unfettered access to the “true” Elisabeth. The fetishized re
presentation of Elisabeth’s hair in the Winterhalter paintings and in
numerous popular culture depictions of the Empress include, for
example, the Empress Elisabeth Barbie doll, whose gorgeous mane is
perfectly coiffed to signify a femininity and an accessibility that cannot
quite be domesticated. These depictions offer an alluring, “forbidden”
vision of the untamed wildness of the Empress who, by reputation,
never submitted to the rigors and disciplines of court life but preferred
intimate settings and the company of those outside of the court. The
Winterhalter paintings remind us of the fetish function that is insinu-
ated in many representations of the Empress’s hair. As Olivia Gruber
Florek points out, Elisabeth’s hair, as a fetish, draws “attention to her
sexuality while also denying access to the viewer.”21 In her essay for

20 Barthes, Mythologies, 48–9.
21 See Olivia Gruber Florek, “‘I Am a Slave to My Hair’: Empress Elisabeth of Aus-
tria, Fetishism, and Nineteenth-Century Austrian Sexuality,” Modern Austrian
Literature 42, no. 2 (2009): 3.
this volume, Florek shows how Winterhalter’s paintings of Elisabeth

likewise reveal Elisabeth’s own interest in shaping visual representa-
tions of herself.
For the Viennese Sigmund Freud, writing in the last years of the
Habsburg Empire and the early years of the First Austrian Republic,
hair is a common fetish object, as it functions as a mask, hiding some-
thing and yet pointing to what is underneath.22 Reigning at a time in
which the Habsburg Empire was heading towards its own destruction,
“Sissi” with the wild hair represents both the vulnerability of Habsburg
and, by extension, Austrian power, as well as the disavowal of this vul-
nerability. The abundance of hair in visual representations of Elisabeth,
particularly in imaginative ones, suggests the status of a fetish. Like
Freud’s fetish, through the lens of her hair “Sissi” signifies both the
myth of transparent, “natural” nobility and castration (vulnerability)
and its disavowal (power).
Reflections on Sissi’s negotiation of bodily constraint and natural-
ness appear in Beth Ann Muellner’s analysis of the corporeal nature
of the displays in the Sisi Museum at the Hofburg Palace. Muellner
notes that the shadows of the exhibit’s viewers are sutured onto the
displayed artifacts of the Empress, such as items of her clothing and
accessories of her toilette, creating a posthumous intimacy with her.
This uncannily material and ethereal vision of Elisabeth in Vienna
contrasts with the perspective of Sisi offered by the Gödöllő Royal
Palace in Hungary, where Elisabeth is presented in a more tangible
form, embodied as a horsewoman and a contributor to Hungarian
political development. As Judith Szapor and András Lénárt demon-
strate in their essay, Sisi becomes a metaphor for the Hungarian
national experience of unity and disunity in the monarchy and a
symbol of Hungary’s development vis-à-vis the Habsburg center of
power in Vienna.
In his reflections on collective memory, Halbwachs argues that the
concept of “nobility” is associated with a notion of uniqueness and
particularity that makes it impossible for a noble to be “reduced to
function; he cannot become a simple instrument or a cog-wheel, but
is rather an element or component of the very substance of the soci-
ety.” The noble, then, preserves and maintains the “living force of
22 For Freud the fetish is the product of the disavowal of castration. It both re
presents the phallus in its denial of castration and the lack itself. Hence it both
assuages and feeds castration anxiety. Freud refers to the woman’s “Scham-
haar,” the curtain that reveals “it” is not there. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James
Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 11: 152–153.
8 Sissi’s World
tradition.”23 This conception of nobility continues to be associated with

quality rather than quantity, and with an enduring interest in the past,
a past that has purchase in the realm of the social rather than in the
modern professional sphere. This view of nobility offers perhaps an
explanation for why “Sissi” is such an alluring cypher for the meeting
of contemporary concerns with tradition. As a member of the nobility,
she embodies in essence a tradition that is perceived as unshakeable, as
particular and persevering.
Elisabeth represents the transition in conceptions of gender and fem-
ininity that began in the European Enlightenment. The emergence of
the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century ushered in the “naturaliza-
tion” of ideal modes of femininity. As Sylvia Bovenschen has shown,
the shift from extended to nuclear families in the wake of industriali-
zation limited the available activities of women to the family sphere, in
essence domesticating women.24 The ideal bourgeois woman was not
concerned with fine dress or the rigid social rules of the court. Rather,
she was natural and pure, unable to dissemble. “Sissi,” then, could be
understood as the ideal conflation of these two seemingly contradictory
ideals: of nobility/quality and of natural and modern femininity. She
combines the pedigree of the aristocrat with the unformed naturalness
of the ideal modern woman.25
Perhaps for this reason it becomes particularly difficult to decide
whether “Sissi” is traditional or modern, conservative or subversive. Is
she the free spirit who purportedly helped broker the dual monarchy
with Hungary and who consistently fled the Viennese court, embark-
ing on trips to Gödöllő Palace in Hungary, Miramar Castle in Trieste,
23 Halbwachs, Collective Memory, 128–9. The premodern period assigned “a sin-

gularly concrete and particular physiognomy” to noble families, communities
based on blood. Modernity, Halbwachs explains, brings with it the functional-
ization of society in which the particular is deemphasized in the name of effi-
ciency. Hence, the “noble class has for a long time been the chief upholder of
collective memory…. In the commercial and artisan classes, and in the top strata
of the bourgeoisie, the person becomes indistinguishable from his task, profes-
sion, or function that defines him” (Ibid.).
24 Sylvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit: Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu
kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen (Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp, 1979).
25 The concept of performed naturalness and the ideal female monarch is paro-
died in Ernst Marischka’s 1954 film The Story of Vicki (Mädchenjahre einer Königin,
Austria, Erma-Produktion, 1955) that features Romy Schneider in the role of the
young Queen Victoria. It was released one year prior to the first Sissi film. In
one scene, the court etiquette teacher coaches Vicky in presenting herself “nat-
urally.” Schneider/Vicky consistently laughs at the irony of performing natu-
ralness and remarks that she gets the most praise when she moves her arms as
unnaturally as possible.
and southern locales such as Corfu and Madeira? Or is she rather the
“caged bird” who was obsessed by the ideal of beauty with which she
was associated, exercising compulsively and engaging in exhausting
cosmetic and dressing rituals? Or is she the “Mater Dolorosa,”26 a per-
sona recently highlighted in the Viennese exhibit of that name at the
Hofburg?
The exhibition narrative for “Mater Dolorosa” presented Elisabeth
as a mother so tender that the traumatizing death of her first child
Sophie, at the age of two, served as the catalyst for Elisabeth’s reserved
relationship to her two subsequent children, Rudolph and Gisela. The
exhibit picks up on conservative and traditional interpretations of Elis-
abeth. Overwhelming maternal feelings, we are invited to believe, and
not her desire to be free of the chains of a traditional gender role, forced
her to create distance between herself and her second- and third-born
children. The “Mater Dolorosa” persona attributed to Elisabeth in some
myths recalls George Mosse’s considerations of gender and nationality
in modern Europe. In Nationalism and Sexuality, Mosse argues that the
image of masculine beauty in which passions are stoically contained
(informed by the German classicist J.J. Winckelmann’s “quiet simplic-
ity and noble grandeur,” the ideal qualities of Greek statuary)27 came
to represent modern Europe beginning in the eighteenth century.
Women, he points out, “furnished the national symbols like Germania
and Marianne. But these female symbols were, as we have seen, sedate
rather than dynamic. They stood for immutability rather than pro-
gress, providing the backdrop against which men determined the fate
of nations.”28 From this perspective, the “Mater Dolorosa” represents
the past of the empire; the figure looks backward, reminding us of the
losses forged by the movement of time. In this role, Elisabeth appears
as “sedate rather than dynamic.”
For Mosse, the stereotypical embodiment of manliness was mod-
eled on an ideal of male beauty born in the eighteenth-century Greek
revival, while the image of woman in German or English national ico-
nography was frequently fashioned after traditional portrayals of the
Virgin Mary. Yet the paradoxes of Sissi lie in her ability to evoke both
the mater dolorosa of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and the dynamism of
26 For a description of the Mater Dolorosa exhibition, see “‘Mater dolorosa’:

Sonderschau zeigt Kaiserin Sisi als trauernde Mutter,” Vienna Online, Novem-
ber 26, 2015. Available at: http://www.vienna.at/mater-dolorosa-sonder-
schau-zeigt-kaiserin-sisi-als-trauernde-mutter/4533144 (accessed November 2,
2017).
27 J.J. Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der
Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1969), 22.
28 George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in
Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), 23.
10 Sissi’s World
figures of the ancient world, the Greek and Roman goddesses at play
in the Mediterranean. As Carolin Maikler demonstrates in her essay in
this volume, Sissi’s flight to her Palace Achilleion on Corfu in the Med-
iterranean served as inspiration for Karl Lagerfeld’s fanciful fashions
that imagine her in motion, and his sartorial engagements with Sissi
reflect the shifting fashion and gender ideals of both the 1990s and our
current decade. In contrast, as Christiane Hertel demonstrates in her
contribution, Ulrike Truger’s statue “Elisabeth” embodies the dialectic
of constraint and movement that characterized Elisabeth’s life in Vienna
from which she constantly yearned to escape. Via a reflection on the
alternately fluid and hard material of wax used in Madame Tussaud’s
exhibitions of royal cult figures, Kate Thomas’s essay in this volume
beautifully encapsulates these contradictory perspectives on Sissi and
the difficulties posed to those who try to capture her in effigy.
Sissi embodies the lost sister, daughter, mother, and lover to the
nostalgic. To her fans, she figures as the friend of the downtrodden.
Indeed, during her life Elisabeth was a figure who represented the
minorities of the empire, uniting the rural and urban populations and
overcoming the provincialism associated with many of the Habsburg
lands outside of the major cities of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. She
appeared to complicate the boundaries between center and periph-
ery. She was admired as a champion of the nations within the empire
and a protector of the weak in a monarchy that was itself admired as a
symbol of supra-national political unity.29 Hungarian scholar John Luk-
acs observed that at the time of her death, “The entire Magyar nation
mourned her: she had liked the Magyars and was immensely popular
among them.”30 In Cracow, she was publicly mourned in ceremonies
and in poetry as a symbol of municipal solidarity and sympathy, and in
recognition the city made a “pact of attachment” to the Habsburg mon-
archy.31 At the same time, as Larry Wolff notes, Elisabeth’s assassination
became “a public sensation in which the theatrical, artistic, and poetic
values of fin-de-siècle Cracow pervasively influenced and transmuted
the representation of journalistic reality.”32 This reception in Cracow, a
city which the Empress had never visited, reflected the aura of public
sensation that surrounded the Empress.
29 Adam Kożuchowski, The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary: The Image of the Habsburg

Monarchy in Interwar Europe (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013),
10–11.
30 John Lukacs, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture (New
York: Grove Press, 1988), 120.
31 Larry Wolff, “Dynastic Conservatism and Poetic Violence in Fin-de-Siècle Cra-
cow: The Habsburg Matrix of Polish Modernism,” American Historical Review
106, no. 3 (2001): 746–8.
32 Wolff, “Dynastic Conservatism and Poetic Violence,” 755.
The fascination with Elisabeth began in her lifetime, and she might
be referred to as one of the earliest modern cult figures. She was pur-
sued by the press, by photographers, by admirers, and by critics, both
inside and outside court circles, wherever she appeared, from Vienna
to Corfu. As Alice Freifeld has argued, Elisabeth defined the “celebrity
monarch,” and “she filled the public sphere with the glamour of a new
monarchism and gave royalty a human face.”33 Kate Thomas’s essay
treats this fascination, but relates it to a charismatic vision constructed
“from below,” a cult of personality involving both the object of adora-
tion and the adoring public.34 Thomas illustrates how this fascination,
emerging as it did during Queen Victoria’s reign, is linked to the vener-
ation and memory of the twentieth-century icon Princess Diana.
Since Elisabeth’s death more than a century ago, artists, sculptors,
writers, playwrights, poets, and screenwriters have been trying to cap-
ture and convey what they perceive as her essence. Public monuments
to her memory dot cityscapes across former imperial lands, and images
of her grace parks, open spaces, and squares to this day. In 1903 Aus-
trian Alois Riegl, a father of the modern discipline of art history, argued
in a manner that foreshadows Benjamin’s understanding of history that
historical monuments did not have an intrinsic eternal value, but rather
only a “present value.” He saw them, particularly in Hungary, as the
product of national egoism.35
The symbolic meaning and value of historical monuments in the
Habsburg lands were recognized even while the Empress was alive.
As the architecture in the late monarchy sought to capture the ethnic
uniqueness of lands of the empire, often articulated in particular polit-
ical and national ideologies through language policies and practices,
so, too, did public monuments express the “architectural polyglotism”
of the Habsburg empire and its royal family.36 This nationalist perspec-
tive and its manipulations and historical distortions are highlighted
in Szapor and Lénárt’s explanation of Elisabeth’s appeal in Hungary
and in Hametz and Klabjan’s examination of her shifting popularity in
33 Alice Freifeld, “Empress Elisabeth as Hungarian Queen: The Uses of Celebrity

Monarchism,” in Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegories, and State
Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy, ed. Laurence Cole and Daniel Unowsky
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 139.
34 On “Constructing Charisma from Below,” see Berenson and Giloi, “Introduc-
tion”, 10–13.
35 Ernö Marosi, “National Monument and Museum Affairs: Musealization of the
National Monuments,” in The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy Revisited, ed. András
Gerö (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 91–2, 111.
36 On the “language” of Habsburg architecture, see Anthony Alofsin, When Build-
ings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and Its Aftermath, 1867–
1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 6–10.
12 Sissi’s World
Trieste in Italy. Part of the fascination with Sissi certainly stems from
her reputation as a sympathetic yet tragic figure whose assassination
has been seen to mark the first rattle of the death throes of the Central
European empire. The memory of the Empress, celebrated throughout
the empire after her assassination in September 1898, enhanced her
international renown and appeal, rendering her a sympathetic figure
and the heroine of a tragedy; she was interpreted as a symbol of the
empire struggling in hostile seas, against enemies within and without.
Elisabeth/Sissi and Nostalgia

After Elisabeth’s death, statues erected in her memory in Habsburg
lands were designed to frame her in particular political or cultural con-
texts. Even today, more than a century after her death, she appears in
various poses from regally seated to standing upright, and in myriad
forms from young maiden to enigmatic sphinx. From these roots in the
late years of the empire, the Habsburg myth sprouted in the interwar
period following the dissolution of the empire and the eclipse of the
monarchy. This period saw the emergence of literary and historical
works that stirred popular imagination37 and reflected nostalgia for
what appeared to be the “golden years” of empire.38 The Habsburgs’
passage into the history books contrasted sharply with the violent fate
met by the Romanovs and the hereditary rulers of the Ottoman empire,
allowing the Habsburg legacy to emerge in a particularly nostalgic light
and dissociating the Habsburgs, at least to some extent, from the bel-
licose and disruptive nationalist and political discourses of the inter-
war years. In addition, for the post-World War I Austrian state, civic
institutions and social elites found imperial imagery a more solid foun-
dation for the construction of a national identity than ethno-nation-
alist discourses which relied on supra-national Germanness.39 Thus,
the period between the two wars nurtured the romanticized visions
of the Habsburg monarchs, particularly Franz Joseph and Elisabeth,
perspectives on the monarchs that have endured to the present day.
Romanticized, reverent images of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth are the
most common trope of Habsburg representation in exhibitions today,
as Susanne Kelley shows in her essay, both affirming the enduring
37 For an excellent overview of literary responses to Elisabeth during her life but
especially during the early years after her death, see Carolin Maiker, Kaiserin
Elisabeth von Österreich: Die Entstehung eines literarischen Mythos 1854–1918
(Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2011).
38 On the construction of the Habsburg myth in the interwar period, see Kożu-
chowski, Afterlife of Austria-Hungary, 3.
39 Peter Thaler, The Ambivalence of Identity: The Austrian Experience of Nation Build-
ing in a Modern Society (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001), 2.
symbolic power of the Habsburgs in Vienna and “introducing” them to

American audiences.
Despite the frayed fabric of the empire, instability and disillusion-
ment in the interwar period led to nostalgia based on distorted mem-
ories of the peace under Habsburg rule and unification under the
monarchy. This sense of an empire led by its royal sovereigns, who
embodied the unification of all peoples in its realms, was enhanced in
the interwar period by the incessant march of racial regimes, nationalist
dictatorships, and ethnic violence after the monarchy’s demise.
The empire’s collapse no doubt played a role in the Empress’s emer-
gence as a popular icon, beloved by people across the social, political,
and cultural spectra. In the interwar period and the decades following,
the Habsburg state’s disappearance from the territorial and political
map facilitated the recrafting of the royal family members in the pub-
lic imagination as non-threatening representatives of a bygone era of
relative peace and stability. The Habsburg monarchy also has an aura
of dignity and splendor and evokes as well a sense of pity for its igno-
ble end and the collapse of the realm.40 While Franz Joseph is remem-
bered as the epitome of the monarchy and the leader of the Habsburg
realms, the memory of Elizabeth is less distinct and more flexible.41
Franz Joseph was the head of the Habsburg state; but Elisabeth, as con-
sort and as a woman, appeared as the head of the Habsburg nation(s)
as a very real but much more oblique representative of the Habsburg
monarchy, playing a more sympathetic role for peoples throughout the
empire. The oblique references to authority in images of the monarchy
after its demise are instrumentalized, as Fei-Hsien Wang and Ke-chin
Hsia show, in representations of Sissi in China. In China beginning in
the 1990s, the Sissi myth has been appropriated to resonate with social-
ist values on the one hand; on the other hand the successful use of her
image for consumerist ends is evident in commodities from vacation
packages to sanitary napkins.
The collapse of the Habsburg Empire coincided with the end of
World War I in a firmly modern age, characterized not only by the
triumph of individual nations over the imperial state, but also by the
advent of technologies of mass destruction and the arrival of a new
feeling of precarity. The sense of imperial loss and the crumbling of the
empire led to the emergence of “Habsburg nostalgia,” a perspective on
remembrance that has emerged in academic discourse in recent years.42
40 Kożuchowski, Afterlife of Austria-Hungary, 162.

41 Kożuchowski, Afterlife of Austria-Hungary, 147, on Franz Joseph as the epitome
of the monarchy.
42 See Heidi Schlipphacke, ed., special issue on “Habsburg nostalgia,” Journal of
Austrian Studies 47, no. 2 (2014).
14 Sissi’s World
Nostalgia, as defined by Svetlana Boym, is an “historical emotion” and

the affective mode of modernity, an experience of loss of place, of home-
sickness, that ultimately becomes “a disease of the modern age.”43 What
we might call Habsburg nostalgia appears in a number of essays in this
volume and manifests not only in Austria but throughout the former
Habsburg territories and beyond. Coined as a medical condition in the
late seventeenth century, nostalgia was associated with the experience
of distance from the homeland (originally suffered by seventeenth-cen-
tury Swiss mercenary soldiers). Jean Starobsinski,44 Boym, and others
point out that nostalgia has become a much more complicated affective
state in modernity, a period in which the Western subject feels almost
ceaselessly “out of time and place” vis-à-vis his or her origins. Indeed,
as Boym makes clear, modern nostalgia is as much about the longing
for a different time, “the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of
our dreams,” as it is about the longing for a homeland.45 The desire to
return to what is perceived as the endless time of childhood, an expe-
rience of time characterized by play rather than by the “homogenous”
(Benjamin) time of the modern capitalist clock, is ubiquitous.46 The
nostalgia for a lost empire is reflected not only in the myriad literary
and artistic representations of Elisabeth, but also in souvenirs, popular
culture products, and exhibitions dedicated to Franz Joseph and Elis-
abeth. In this volume Susanne Kelley and Beth Muellner both reflect
on the ideological and affective functions of exhibitions—what might
be called “musealization”—focusing on Elisabeth and Franz Joseph.47
In the German and Austrian context, the concept of nostalgia can be
linked to ideas of Heimat or homeland, that is, an idealized connection
to a place of origin.48 In Joseph Roth’s 1938 novel Die Kapuzinergruft, the
character Trotta, born in Vienna but whose ancestral home is Spiolje (in
today’s Serbia), reminisces that Heimat was stronger at the periphery
than in the center of the empire before its demise.49 As Trotta describes
it, Franz Joseph was at his most popular and most powerful far from
the center of Vienna, at the outskirts of the empire. Indeed, we often
43 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic, 2001), xvi, 7.
44 Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 54 (1966): 81–103.
45 Boym, Future of Nostalgia, xv.
46 For a more detailed discussion of the vicissitudes of Habsburg nostalgia, see
Heidi Schlipphacke, “The Temporalities of Habsburg Nostalgia,” Journal of Aus-
trian Studies 42, no. 7 (2014): 1–17.
47 On the concept of “musealization,” see Marosi, “National Monument and
Museum Affairs,” 89.
48 For a compelling overview of the concept of Heimat, see Elizabeth Boa, Hei-
mat—A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture
1890–1990 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000).
49 Joseph Roth, Die Kapuzinergruft (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1985).
associate Heimat, love of home, with national identity, but what do we

make of the love of empire?50
The nostalgia for a pre-national entity suggests a certain skepticism
vis-à-vis the idealized concept of the modern national “citizen.” Per-
haps, the Habsburg nostalgic muses, the promised rights of the citi-
zen fall short in their lived form. If a sense of unity is gained in the
realization of the modern nation, the nation likewise marks the loss of
the less mechanized imperial sense of time and place. As Franz Kafka
teaches us in his narrative “The Chinese Wall” (“Beim Bau der chinesis-
chen Mauer”) (1917), the Emperor is both the center of the empire and
always too far away from his subjects to be truly relevant.51 Habsburg
nostalgia, manifested here as Sissi nostalgia, is surely informed by a
modern skepticism about the promise of the nation for former “sub-
jects” both at the center and the margins of the ever-changing empire.
Nostalgia is also squarely placed within conceptions of the “modern”
associated with western Europe and the United States at the turn of the
twentieth century.
One of the earliest posthumous biographies of Elisabeth, The Mar-
tyrdom of an Empress (1899), written by an anonymous friend later to be
revealed as Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen, set the tone for laudatory treat-
ments of the Empress that insist on Elisabeth’s sweet nature and sense
of justice and equality by depicting her as a modern woman in her hab-
its and political outlook, possessed of a saintly nature and the spirit of a
martyr.52 The biography also highlighted the Empress’s renowned mys-
terious and ephemeral qualities, her attempts to escape public scrutiny,
and her difficulties with court life and responsibilities that provided the
fodder for tantalizing revelations and conspiratorial theories in subse-
quent biographies and popular treatments of her.
In the English-language literature, these earliest accounts were fol-
lowed by works based on well-known reports about the Empress, for
50 Two of the most famous literary figures associated with Habsburg nostalgia
are the authors Joseph Roth and Stephan Zweig, both Jews from the former
Habsburg territories who waxed nostalgic about the multiethnic state. Indeed,
Steven Beller reminds us that many Jews idealized the Habsburg Empire as a
response to the rise of anti-Semitism. See Steven Beller, “The World of Yester-
day Revisited: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Jews of Fin-de-siècle Vienna,” Jewish
Social Studies 2, no. 2 (1996): 37–53.
51 Franz Kafka, “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer,” in Beschreibung eines Kampfes:
Novellen, Skizzen, Aphorismen aus dem Nachlaß (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1983); for an
English language edition, see Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N.
Glatzner, trans. Tania Stern and James Stern (New York: Schocken, 1995).
52 Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen, The Martyrdom of an Empress (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1899). This vision is portrayed throughout the text, but is mentioned
specifically on pp. 35–7.
16 Sissi’s World
example Elizabeth Sprigge’s The Raven’s Wing, published in 1940 and

inspired by Katriona Sprigge, an acquaintance of the Empress.53 Later
works recount series of vignettes that aim to reproduce aspects of the
Empress’s life that imagine her to be a deeply modern, perhaps even
feminist, figure. For example, Elisabeth famously sported a tattoo, a
sign of rebellion against not only the court but also against traditional
gender roles. She loved, as is well known, hounds, horses, and the
hunt.54 The Empress Elisabeth’s obsessions with exercise and diet have
been mentioned in studies of food, history of medicine, and leisure. She
was also enamored of modern technology and purportedly introduced
a modern toilet system into the Hofburg. The fictional representation
of Elisabeth as a metaphor for Austria, representing both its strengths
and weaknesses, is the subject of Anita McChesney’s essay in this col-
lection, in which she shows how Empress Elisabeth represents Austria
for a cross-section of twentieth-century Viennese residents in Lilian
Faschinger’s novel Vienna Passion (Wiener Passion) (1999). McChesney
highlights how in Faschinger’s text individual memories of Elisabeth
construct the national vision vis-à-vis perceptions of ideal femininity.
Elizabeth Black’s essay likewise examines the transposition of Sissi
in time and across class boundaries, as she is imagined on the stage
and the screen as an entrapped and barely relevant representation of
a dying monarchy in Jean Cocteau’s The Eagle Has Two Heads (L’Aigle à
deux têtes) (1943 and 1948, respectively).
Elisabeth is imagined both as a protector of the weak and as a model
of beauty and modern civilization, embodying modernizing elements
of the monarchy in its missions for the peoples of the empire. In these
respects, she is viewed as a Greek goddess in the population’s midst, a
reputation furthered by her attention to classical beauty, her cultivation
of the arts, particularly the classical arts, and her well-known affinity
for Ancient Greece. Elisabeth loved to escape to Corfu and her Greek
palace Achilleion, which forms an important backdrop for Maikler’s
essay on Karl Lagerfeld’s fashion stagings at this site. The emphasis on
the Empress’s beauty and charisma in fashion circles and her enduring
influence on style traverse the globe, as Wang and Hsia demonstrate in
their examination of Sissi in China. In addition, the essays by Maikler,
Florek, and Wang and Hsia offer insights into the Empress’s links to
modernity and feminism. Her status as a model of contemporary taste
and as a modern icon of beauty and grace are reflected in the range of
Sissi kitsch objects and memorabilia, from the Sissi Barbie doll to Sissi
commemorative tea tins.
53 Elizabeth Sprigge, Raven’s Wing (New York: Macmillan, 1940).

54 See John Welcome, The Sporting Empress: The Story of Elizabeth of Austria and Bay
Middleton (London: Michael Joseph, 1975).
The Empress Elisabeth has also been tied to particular roles in differ-
ent geographic contexts. For example, The Sporting Empress highlights
her love of nature, open air, and sport in the context of sojourns in Eng-
land and her relationship with Bay Middleton.55 English-language nov-
els tend to use the Empress’s relationship with Middleton as a means
to write England into Sissi’s story. In these tales Sissi often plays the
role of romantic foil who ultimately loses out to heroines of minor Eng-
lish nobility who triumph in capturing Middleton’s heart.56 As Kate
Thomas shows in her contribution to this volume, Sissi’s reception in
the British context dovetails with the British perception of royalty, in
particular with regard to the mythic image of Elisabeth’s contemporary
royal, Queen Victoria.
If Sissi went to the United Kingdom to ride, she traversed Europe in
her peregrinations as well. On the continent, tourists are beckoned to
the Sisi Straße (Sisi’s road), a “cultural route” or tourist itinerary that
traces Elisabeth’s paths, winding from the Unterwittelsbach mansion
in Aichach, Bavaria to the Achilleion Palace in Corfu.57 Tourist asso-
ciations and tourism boards invite eager Sissi fans to walk in Sissi’s
footsteps and tout Sissi/Sisi sites scattered throughout Central Europe.
These travel packages capitalize on popular nostalgia, the memory of
the Empress, and the romance of the Habsburg monarchy. The popu-
larity of Sisi’s road marks the Empress as an iconic figure; tourists trac-
ing her footsteps become pilgrims paying homage to her memory. But
along the path, visions of the Empress are complicated and conflictual,
and her legacy is uncertain and, as Hametz and Klabjan demonstrate in
their essay on Elisabeth in Trieste, highly contingent with regard to time
period and circumstances.
Social scientists appear to be endlessly fascinated by Sissi’s psyche.
As Elisabeth’s life coincided with that of the father of psychoanalysis,
Sigmund Freud, it is tempting to utilize his methods in trying to under-
stand her. Her death in 1898 coincides not only with Freud’s work on
dreams, but also with his research on hysteria. It is truly surprising
that there is no major case study of Elisabeth that diagnoses her as a
hysteric in Freudian/Charcotian terms. Freud was treating his famous
patient “Dora” in Vienna around the time of Elisabeth’s death, and the
Empress’s poetry, the stories about her body obsessions and retreats
from the public certainly invite an analysis of Elisabeth as an “hysteric”
55 See Welcome, The Sporting Empress.

56 Barbara Cartland, Stars in My Heart (New York: Pyramid Books, 1973) and Daisy
Goodwin, The Fortune Hunter: A Novel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014).
Goodwin has been translated into Spanish, Italian, and German.
57 Sisi’s Road—a Cultural Route (website). Available at: http://www.sisi-strasse.
info/en/home.html (accessed July 10, 2016).
18 Sissi’s World
who represses her sexual desires. In a book purporting to get behind

the myth of Elisabeth and Franz Joseph, the Italian Daniele Casini, a
specialist in psychological literature and philosophy, teamed up with
Guendalina Rossi, a psychiatrist, to construct a psychoanalytic dia-
logue and then to present a psychoanalytically informed anamnesis of
the Empress Elisabeth and Franz Joseph to identify their illnesses and
suggest proper treatment.58 However, the medical maladies of the his-
torical personage await further scrutiny in studies beyond the purview
of this book.
The iconic image of the Empress of today can be traced to the figure
portrayed by Romy Schneider in the 1950s Sissi film trilogy directed
by Ernst Marischka and explored by Heidi Schlipphacke as movies
that offer a complex (both straight and queer; historical and allegor-
ical) engagement with post-fascist memory and aesthetics.59 These
post-World War II films, created at the beginning of the Cold War and
reflecting western perspectives on femininity and domesticity typical
of the 1950s, set the standard for the images of Sissi that predominate
today. The first film of the trilogy, Sissi, premiered in 1955, the year of
the signing of the post-war Austrian constitution (“Staatsvertrag”). The
second and third films, Sissi: The Young Empress (Sissi: Die junge Kai-
serin) and Fateful Years of An Empress (Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin), also
starring Schneider, followed on the heels of the first, in 1956 and 1957,
respectively. Screenings of these films attracted amongst the highest
volume of filmgoers in German and Austrian history, and they remain
among the most popular films in both countries; indeed, Sissi is still
screened every year around Christmas on German and Austrian public
television.
One key to the immense popularity of the films is the emergence
of Romy Schneider as star. While the actress famously later said that
“Sissi sticks to me just like cream of wheat,” the fresh-faced daughter of
actress Magda Schneider (who incidentally plays Sissi’s mother in the
films) captures the charisma of the Empress, transforming it into a cap-
tivating vision of Sissi in the imagination of a post-World War II public.
And just as Sissi stuck to Romy, Romy stuck to Sissi after 1955. Ask a
German or Austrian how she envisions Elisabeth, and she will describe
Romy Schneider. Schneider’s embodiment of the Empress, the blend of
imperial nostalgia and modern femininity that Romy/Sissi perfected in
the film, resonates not just in Europe, but globally, as Wang and Hsia
show in their essay about the popularity of “Xixi” in modern China.
58 Daniela Casini, Sissi & Franz: Dentro il mito (Trieste: MGS Press, 2000).
59 Ernst Marischka (dir.), Sissi (Austria, Erma, 1955); Sissi: Die junge Kaiserin (Aus-
tria, Erma, 1956); Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin (Austria, Erma, 1957).
Of course, other films and theatrical productions about the Empress

were made: Marischka produced a highly successful musical in the
1930s that was the source for Josef von Sternberg’s Hollywood ver-
sion The King Steps Out (1936). More contemporary representations
of the Sissi narrative were made in Germany, but these were not par-
ticularly successful.60 Michael (Bully) Herbig’s animated parody Lissi
und der wilde Kaiser of 2007 had more resonance (selling some 2.8
million tickets in the German-speaking countries), but its popularity
cannot be compared to that of the Marischka films. Indeed, Herbig’s
parody probably resonated precisely because of its clear citations of
the Marischka films and the Romy/Sissi vision of the Empress that
is one of the few universal pop culture references in Germany and
Austria.61 Schneider’s reprisal of the Sissi role in Luchino Visconti’s
1973 film Ludwig II is both an homage and an exorcism of sorts, as
Visconti’s Romy/Sissi both embodies the figure Marischka created
and joyfully sabotages her in scenes in which Elisabeth teases her
cousin Ludwig and muses critically on the various ways in which
she functions as a projection screen for the subjects of the empire.62
This camp version of Sisi and the visions of her sabotage staged for
the audience’s delight is at the heart of Susanne Hochreiter’s essay,
which reveals the many ways in which Sisi’s character has been par-
odied and transformed on stage and screen. As Hochreiter’s contri-
bution demonstrates, the narrative that venerates the Empress as a
queer icon challenges convention and resonates across a variety of
social groups, revealing a complex nexus of sex, gender, visuality,
and society.
As brilliant as Schneider’s performance was in the Visconti film, it
has seemingly had no sway over the iconic status of her earlier per-
formance in the Marischka films. More successful in recent years has
been the musical interpretation of the Sissi story, commissioned by the
Vereinigte Bühnen Wien (VBW), which premiered in Vienna in 1992
and has been viewed by millions around the world, becoming the most
popular German language musical ever produced.63 The story of the
Empress’s life, revived in Vienna twice in 2003 and 2012, has thrilled
audiences across Europe and in Asia, in Tokyo, Seoul, and Shanghai.
As we write this, the musical continues to tour, with engagements
60 Christoph Böll (dir.), Sissi und der Kaiserkuss (Maran Film/Calypso/KG, 1991);
and the 2009 German and Austrian public television joint production of Sisi (dir.
Xaver Schwarzenberger, ZDF/ORF).
61 Michael “Bully” Herbig (dir.), Lissi und der wilde Kaiser, herbX film, 2007.
62 Luchino Visconti, Ludwig II (Mega Film/Cinetel/KG-Divina Film, 1973).
63 Based on the libretto “Elisabeth” by Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay
(Vienna, 1992).
20 Sissi’s World
scheduled throughout Germany in 2018.64 While the success of the

musical awaits scholarly interpretation, it is the story and music of the
interpretation that seem to create the magic for audiences rather than
the actors themselves. No contemporary performer has emerged to take
Schneider’s place as the revered Sissi.
Sissi in North America?

In our research on the reception of “Sissi,” we have asked repeatedly
why it is that this beloved figure has not traveled across the Atlantic
to North America as she has to Asia. How is it that the Empress is rel-
atively unknown in a country that fetishizes royalty while lacking any
of its own? Persistent promises of an American Sissi film have failed to
materialize. Iconic beauty “Catherine Zeta Jones will play the Empress
Sissi,” reported Mexico’s El Universal in January 2008. Tom Hanks,
according to the story, would star as Franz Joseph. A quick internet
search offers several stories in Spanish and German reporting, according
to sources in Paris, that Lilly Berger would produce the project linked to
Time Warner and Disney on the fiftieth anniversary of Marischka’s Sissi
trilogy. A Hungarian culture site picked up on the theme, providing
further details that the project would be filmed on location in Austria,
Hungary, Italy, and India, and that filming was set to start in autumn
2009 but was delayed by a writers’ strike.65 Since 2009, no further men-
tion of the promised romantic costume drama has surfaced, and the
purported project does not appear to have left an imprint on American
film circles, if it was ever a real project at all.66
These were not the only rumors of a phantom Sissi film project. In
her honors thesis at Smith College in April 2000 Kristin Kniss reported
that British actor and director Sir Richard Attenborough planned to
make a new “Sissi” film, with the lead to be played by Catherine Zeta-
Jones. Kniss reported that filming was to begin in December of 2000.67
These rumors from around the globe of the production of a Hollywood
blockbuster portraying the Habsburg royal couple testify to the idio-
syncratic and central place that Sissi holds in Europe, Latin America,
and parts of Asia, where she is remembered as a great beauty and a
tragic royal akin to a nineteenth-century Princess Diana.
64 Sissi: das Musical über Liebe, Macht und Leidenschaft (website). Available at:
http://www.sissi-musical.com/ (accessed November 7, 2017).
65 Hungarian News Agency (MTI), “Hollywood ‘Sisi’ Film in the Making.” Available
at: http://www.culture.hu/main.php?folderID=1085&articleID=266029&ctag=ar-
ticlelist&iid=1 (accessed February 13, 2008).
66 We thank Kim Berner for investigating these reports and finding them to be
mere speculations or rumors.
67 Kristin Kniss, “The Origin and Development of the Legend of Empress Eliza-
beth, 1859–2000,” MA Thesis, Smith College, Northampton, MA, 2001, 9.
In the early part of the twentieth century, many Americans shared the
European veneration of the enigmatic Empress and made pilgrimages
to sites associated with her. In 1917, American writer John Stoddard
was inspired to write poetry celebrating Elisabeth’s life upon seeing her
“troubled marble face” on the statue in Merano, Italy. “Seated by the
river, [i]n a robe of spotless white” Sissi’s “lovely face illumined [b]y the
evening’s tender light”68 are lines that offer the vision of an angel chan-
neling holy light, recalling the tragic fate of the beautiful Elisabeth. And
while the statue, erected in 1903, still stands today in Empress Elisabeth
Park in Merano, it can hardly be called a pilgrimage site for contem-
porary Americans. Sissi is largely absent from American imaginations,
and those who do stumble across her do so at one of the many sites
dedicated to Elisabeth’s memory in Europe.
Allison Pataki’s historical novels, The Accidental Empress: A Novel
(2015) and the most recent Sisi: Empress on Her Own (2017), both New
York Times bestsellers, have raised the Empress’s profile for American
audiences in recent years. But the book jacket for Sisi: Empress on Her
Own assumes an ignorant readership, an American audience being
introduced for the very first time to the historical figure at the center of
the “sweeping and powerful novel,” that “tells the little-known story of
Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, the Princess Diana of her time,
a dynamic heroine during the Golden Age of the Habsburg Empire.”69
It is jaw-dropping that in 2017 the story of Elisabeth of Austria, who
has fascinated fans across the globe for the last century and a half, is
identified as “little-known.”
The Habsburg Empress’s failure to resonate with North American
audiences is also surprising given the prevalence of images of central
European princesses in popular fairy tales, particularly of Cinderella
and her famous castle, immortalized by Walt Disney. Even in the post-
war period, perspectives on the Habsburg monarchy have failed to cap-
ture American audiences. Despite its star-studded cast (the film starred
Bing Crosby) and spectacular scenery (of the Canadian Rockies) and cos-
tumes that contributed to its garnering prestigious award nominations,
Paramount Pictures’s The Emperor Waltz (1949)70 is barely remembered.71
68 John L. Stoddard, “The Statue of the Empress Elizabeth. Meran,” in Poems (Chi-
cago: Geo. L. Shuman & Co., 1917), 211–12.
69 Allison Pataki, Sisi: Empress on Her Own (New York: Dial Press, 2017).
70 Billy Wilder, dir., The Emperor Waltz (Paramount Pictures, 1949). The film depicts
the true story of an American salesman’s attempt to sell a gramophone to
Emperor Franz Joseph, offering an enjoyable mash up of American capitalist
brashness with Habsburg ritualized etiquette.
71 Thank you to Joseph Patrouch for his observations on the use of the Canadian
Rockies to depict the Alps. In 1949, the film received Academy Award nomi-
nations for Best Costume Design and Best Music, as well as a Writers Guild of
America Award nomination for Best Written American Musical.
22 Sissi’s World
For American audiences, Austrian identity, if it is acknowledged,

remains tied to romantic, cinematic visions of the “governess Maria”
in The Sound of Music (1965), a film that portrays the escape of the
Von Trapp singers from the Nazis in 1930s Salzburg in a fictionalized
journey across the Alps into Switzerland.72 This image of Austria
was surely rooted in the desire on the part of both the Austrian state
and the Americans to distance the Second Republic of Austria from
its Nazi past. The film reiterates the portrayal of Austria as Hitler’s
“first victim” and as a site of anti-Nazi resistance and makes the
country’s World War II history more palatable to worldwide audi-
ences.73
Young Americans may be introduced to the Empress in Elisabeth:
The Princess Bride, 1853 published in 2003 as the fourteenth book in
Scholastic Press’s Royal Diaries series.74 In the book, readers meet
a highly fictionalized Elisabeth and follow her through her court-
ship and marriage to Franz Joseph, recounted as the “most dramatic
moment in Sisi’s life.”75 Author Barry Denenberg interestingly admits
that he was drawn to the “enigmatic and enchanting Empress” while
writing the fictionalized diary of an Austrian Jewish émigré escap-
ing Hitler to the United States.76
In adult fiction published in England, France, and Germany, Elis-
abeth appears as a tragic beauty, a misunderstood royal, or an enig-
matic woman involved in romance and intrigue.77 The penny novels
play on Elisabeth’s well-known attempts to avoid the formalities
72 The film creates its own mythic Austrian landscape. Salzburg is near the Ger-
man, not the Swiss, border, and its mountain scenes were actually filmed in
Bavaria. Robert Wise, dir., The Sound of Music (20th Century Fox, 1965).
73 Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, “Beyond ‘The Sound of Music’: The Quest for
Cultural Identity in Modern Austria,” German Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2003): 289–90.
74 The series of twenty books was published by Scholastic Press, Inc. from 1999 to
2003. It was relaunched in 2013 with the reprinting of the “diaries” of Anastasia
and Marie Antoinette.
75 Barry Denenberg, Elisabeth: The Princess Bride, 1853 (New York: Scholastic, 2003),
146.
76 Denenberg, Elisabeth, 146. His research on Austria in the 1930s was for One Eye
Laughing, the Other Weeping: The Diary of Julie Weiss, Vienna, Austria to New York
1938 (New York: Scholastic Press, 2000), published in the Dear America series
of thirty-six books from 1996 to 2004. His description of Elisabeth, designed for
a young audience, encapsulates the myths of her life and memory at the turn
of the twenty-first century: “Her extraordinary beauty, which was legendary,
was complimented by her independent spirit and liberal political philosophy:
characteristics of a woman born ahead of her time. She paid a dear price for her
nonconformist ways,” 146.
77 In France, Sissi is the subject of a four-volume series of youth books written by
Christine Féret-Fleury recounting her life from infancy to her engagement at
Bad Ischl. She also appears in the illustrated French children’s series Grandes
of court life, her horsemanship, and reputation as a friend of the

common people.78 Recent novels in English reflect their authors’ per-
sonal sympathies with the Elisabeth story, sympathies that are often
inspired by familial or ethnic ties to the former Habsburg lands or by
travel and encounter with the Sissi myth promulgated in museums
and exhibitions throughout Central Europe and around the world.79
In light of the overlapping, intertwining, and yet distinctive under-
standings of the concepts of memory and myth presented in this vol-
ume, we have organized it in two sections. The first section, “Memory,”
includes essays that emphasize physical representations of the Empress
that attempt to capture her as an historic figure and then reimagine her
place in time and space. The second section, “Myth,” includes essays
that explore depictions of Elisabeth in which the Empress is represented
through the lens of reconstructed visions that themselves often serve to
reconfigure Sissi in the modern world.80
There is, of course, much scope for future research. Some areas of
research less popular with respect to current analytical frameworks
and therefore not well represented in this volume cry out for further
examination. For example, the monarchy has enjoyed a reputation as
a staunch protector of Catholicism, a trait that has served as a basis for
a distinctive Austrian national identity and, particularly in the wake
of World War II, as an element of differentiation between Austrian and
German state identities when Austrians sought to distance themselves
from their role in the crimes of Nazism.81 Understandings of Habsburg
relations to the Church and piety have played a significant role in con-
ceptions of country and nation within the various geographical contexts
figures de l’histoire written by Patricia Crété and published by Quelle Histoire.

The volume Sissi, published in December 2016, joins treatments of other famous
historic figures, including such women as Marie Curie, Coco Chanel, and Marie
Antoinette. German-language books depicting the life of Sissi range from popu-
lar historiographies to children’s books to coloring books and a graphic novel.
78 For example, Cartland, Stars in My Heart, a romantic Cinderella story of a young
English girl who discovers herself to be Elisabeth’s (illegitimate) half-sister and
finds her prince charming in an English lord while impersonating the empress
on an official visit.
79 For example, Pataki’s The Accidental Empress is a fictionalized account of the
Empress’s life from July 1853, just prior to her meeting Franz Joseph, to June
1867, the Hungarian coronation of Elisabeth and Franz Joseph in Budapest, with
emphasis on her relationship with the Hungarians and Count Gyula Andrássy.
The book was inspired by a visit to Schönbrunn Palace and sparked by her inter-
est in her family’s Hungarian heritage. See Pataki, Accidental Empress, 480–88.
80 We acknowledge that the essays cannot be neatly fit into these two categories
but that all bridge both categories as well, recalling Barthes’s overlapping defi-
nitions of memory and myth.
81 Thaler, Ambivalence of Identity, 59–60, 138–39.
24 Sissi’s World
in the former empire.82 The Empress’s role as consort in upholding the

faith and in representing Catholicism throughout the realm affected
and continues to affect the reception of her in the contemporary world.
In light of the resurgence of Catholicism in Central Europe in the wake
of the Soviet collapse, this would no doubt offer a fruitful avenue for
research. Of particular interest in this context, for example, might be the
ways in which her memory must also be associated with Elizabeth of
Hungary or Elizabeth of Thuringia, the thirteenth-century queen can-
onized in 1235 and the patron saint of Hungary. The sainted Elizabeth,
associated with works of public charity in favor of the poor and hungry,
with the followers of St. Francis of Assisi (particularly in terms of the
love of nature) and even with the symbol of the rose, was herself the
subject of studies in the Empress’s lifetime that extended to her diet and
relationship with German and Adriatic nobility (on her mother’s side)
as opposed to Hungarian royalty (on her father’s side).83 Thus, compar-
isons of the Empress to remote, historical figures might be as relevant
to understanding the vitality of the Elisabeth myth as comparisons to
contemporary figures such as Lady Diana.
The essays collected here nevertheless offer key points of access to
what we call “Sissi’s World,” the diverse constellation of consumer
objects and cultural works that refer, whether directly or indirectly, to
the Empress Elisabeth. Taken together, these cultural artifacts reflect an
affective excess or remainder that is channeled into representations of
Sissi. Sissi, it seems, is able to embody and contain our wayward emo-
tions, be they identificatory, fetishizing, idolatrous, nostalgic or ironic.
In light of the precarity of life in what Ulrich Beck calls the “global risk
society,” Sissi likewise serves as a vessel for nostalgic ideologies.84 A
specter who haunts a good deal of the world, a wax figure, a beautiful,
melancholy friend, the discursive construct “Sissi” has created her own
form of cultural empire, one within which, we must admit, we travel
with great pleasure.
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Part I
Memory
Two Encounters: Ulrike Truger,
Elisabeth—Zwang—Flucht—
Freiheit, 1998/99
Christiane Hertel
“I want to be effective in these times.”

Käthe Kollwitz, 19221
Ulrike Truger’s sculpture Elisabeth offers three concepts or experiences,

Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit (Constraint—Flight/Escape—Freedom), that
might be understood as a narrative trajectory of liberation or self-liber-
ation. Yet there are not three figures; there is one. The artist put it thus:
“At first I also had ideas for a sculpture ensemble of several pieces. Then
I realized that the three factors—just as in the human being ‘elisabeth’—
had to be united in a single sculpture,” that is, “tensely united.”2 One
may say, then, that this one figure is in a perpetual, and precise, state
of the “in-between,” to begin with, in-between Zwang and Flucht and
Freiheit. The three views, as identified by Truger (Figures 2.1–2.3),
Several individuals and organizations have facilitated my research for this essay.
I should like to thank Heidi Schlipphacke and Maura Hametz for their invita-
tion to write this essay. I am particularly grateful to Ulrike Truger for her inter-
est in it and for her helpful responses to my many questions about her work. I
thank Imke Meyer and again Heidi Schlipphacke for inviting me to speak about
Truger’s work at the Austrian Studies Association Conference they hosted at the
University of Illinois, Chicago, in March 2017, and thus for making this project
also a work of friendship.
1 Käthe Kollwitz, Die Tagebücher 1908–1945, ed. Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz (Berlin:
Siedler Verlag, 1999) (all translations from the German are mine, unless noted
otherwise). I recently argued that this statement about her graphic oeuvre
extends to Kollwitz’s monumental sculpture. See Christiane Hertel, “Mask and
Husk: Käthe Kollwitz’s Mourning Parents and Self-Portrait in Dialogue,” in Art
and Social Change, ed. Klare Scarborough and Susan M. Dixon (La Salle Univer-
sity, Philadelphia: La Salle University Press, 2016). Here I suggest that it also
applies to Ulrike Truger’s work.
2 Ulrike Truger, email to the author, September 15, 2016.
30 Sissi’s World
Figure 2.1 Ulrike Truger, Elisabeth—Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit, 1998–1999,

Wien, Karlsplatz: Zwang. Courtesy of ARS New York and Ulrike Truger.
Elisabeth—Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit, 1998/99 31

Wien, Karlsplatz: Freiheit. Courtesy of ARS New York and Ulrike Truger.
32 Sissi’s World

Wien, Karlsplatz: Flucht. Courtesy of ARS New York and Ulrike Truger.
succeed each other counter-clockwise not in the sequence suggested

by the sculpture’s subtitle, Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit, but instead as
Zwang—Freiheit—Flucht. The mutual encounter of these different states,
which Truger has also called “feelings” (“gefühle”), is one of tension,
conflict, friction, and contradiction.3 This state of the “in-between” can-
not be resolved. Herein, according to Truger, lies the struggle of Elis-
abeth “as a political woman” as well as the paradigmatic relevance of
Elisabeth for women today. It would be wrong, therefore, to assume
that Elisabeth—Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit solely concerns the Empress’s
private life, even to the limited extent to which this bourgeois concept
applies at all to a monarch. She was part of the Habsburg power institu-
tion at the same time as she struggled with it. What, then, are our pos-
sible encounters with this Elisabeth? Truger’s three terms leave us with
difference and triangularity and the task to discover or identify them in
the sculpture, in its forms as much as its material presence.
At 2.70 m height and 6.5 tons weight, hewn, carved, and chiseled in
white Carrara marble, this sculpture is decidedly and unapologetically
monumental. It also is, in more than one sense, “monumentally femi-
nine” (“monumental weiblich”), to borrow the title of Truger’s recent
collaborative book (Monumental Weiblich, 2015).4 In its or her particular
ways, Elisabeth’s three-in-one points to history, or, rather, histories. It is
at this level that Truger’s monument invokes our dialectical engage-
ment with who, according to this sculpture, Elisabeth was and was
not. The histories I wish to explore here include: first, the artistic prac-
tice of three-in-one sculpture or “tripartite” or “threefold” appearance
(“Dreiansichtigkeit”) and the eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse
about it; second, the Habsburg imperial state portrait of Maria Theresa
and Elisabeth in the medium of sculpture; and, third, Elisabeth’s place
within Truger’s oeuvre and within several of her works’ placements
and displacements in Vienna’s urban spaces. Following the historical
traces intersecting in this monument will lead me to the precise sculp-
tural language of the in-between of Truger’s Elisabeth.
Much inherited monumental sculpture in our built environment is
affirmative of what or whom it was tasked to monumentalize and com-
memorate. Many such works suffer the monumental fate of what in his
Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (Archive/Estate in One’s Lifetime) Robert Musil called
“entmerken” (to de-notice): “One cannot say that we did not notice them;
rather, one should say, they de-notice us, they withdraw from our senses.”5
3 Ulrike Truger, email to the author, October 10, 2016.

4 Ulrike Truger, Monumental Weiblich (Klagenfurt: Ritter Verlag, 2015).
5 Robert Musil, “Denkmale,” in Nachlass zu Lebzeiten, 1936 (Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1980), 61. Ephemerality that is not solely physical, but perceptual and
ideological is explored in Michael Diers, ed., Mo(nu)mente: Formen und Funk-
tionen ephemerer Denkmäler (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1993).
34 Sissi’s World
Other monumental works appear questionable and are approached

either with skepticism regarding their historical truthfulness and validity,
or they are viewed through the lens of historical context for what Alois
Riegl called in 1903 the “modern cult of monuments” (“moderne Denk-
malkultus”).6 Indeed, after the first intentional founding gesture a life of
quite different meanings and interpretations awaits these monuments.
The Pallas Athena Fountain (1878–1901/2) fronting Austria’s Parliament
on the Ringstrasse may serve as an example. Designed, along with the
building and its decorative program, by the Dane Theophil Hansen
(1813–1891), this “monumental fountain” (“Monumentalbrunnen”)
was finished by Carl Kundmann almost two decades after the building
assumed its function in 1883. The Greek style of this architectural and
sculptural ensemble allows, according to Hansen, “along with the great-
est severity and regularity, the greatest freedom at the same time.”7 Later,
a range of different interpretations was—and continues to be—offered
for the sculpture of Pallas Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, among them that
“ultimately the goddess herself keeps watch.”8 On the spectrum’s skepti-
cal end, and with a historical concern for the goals and limitations of the
liberal constitutional state, Carl Schorske proposed, “Here myth stepped
in where history failed to serve.” Athena “was an appropriate deity [,
too,] to represent the liberal unity of politics and rational culture.” Yet
“she stares stonily across the windswept center of life: the Ringstrasse
itself.”9
Here I wish to turn from the affirmative monument to what James
Young in his influential study of Holocaust memorials called the
counter-monument. He borrowed the term from sculptors working
in the 1970s and 1980s who sought to incorporate iconoclasm into
the art of monumental sculpture, for example, by making it “self-
abnegating” as well as participatory. This was the case with Jochen
Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s Monument against Fascism of 1986 in
Hamburg-Harburg. A 12-meter high, lead-clad square column, it had
gradually sunk into the ground by 1993, along with the graffiti and
signatures with which viewers had been free, indeed invited, to mark
it. For Young the “precise beauty of the counter-monument” is that it
6 Alois Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus, sein Wesen, seine Entstehung, (1903),
translated into English by Kurt Forster as “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its
Character and Its Origin,” Oppositions, A Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Archi-
tecture 25 (1982): 21–51.
7 120 Jahre Parlament, Katalog zur Ausstellung aus Anlass des 12-120. Jahrestages der
ersten Plenarsitzung im Parlamentgebäude (Vienna, 2003), 14, 18–19.
8 Walter M. Weiss, Wien (Cologne: DuMont, 2000), 137.
9 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage
Books, 1981), 43.
prompts an “ongoing exchange between people and their historical

past.”10 More recently, Shalev-Gerz addressed her fundamental con-
cern about the “trust-gap” between art or artist and audience, espe-
cially in the area of politically and socially engaged art; she stressed
the importance of “trust as a term and condition essential to open-
ing and maintaining a space of interrelations” in her collaborative
research through art project, Trust and the Unfolding Dialogue (2010–
2012).11
Neither affirmative monuments nor counter-monuments are the
main topic of this essay. However, I invoke these concepts here with
particular questions in mind: can a monumental and assertive sculpture
dedicated to an individual subject allow for an encounter, rather than
a confrontation, with the “historical past” (Young), thus “an exchange”
with history understood to include but also to go beyond individual
biography? In other words, can such a sculpture, rather than pointing
to positive or negative exemplarity, engage the viewer, both the one
who seeks it out and the daily passer-by, in something like an encounter
on an equal footing, that is, an encounter inflected by the possibility
of discovering a shared experience? These questions take me to Ulrike
Truger’s Elisabeth—Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit.12
Dreiansichtigkeit
Dreiansichtigkeit describes a structural concept in baroque and rococo
sculpture from Bernini onward. Most often it is used in sculpture
of either three-fold single figures or three-figure groups intended
to be sited at or near ground level. The significant eighteenth-cen-
tury Bavarian sculptor Ignaz Günther (1725–1775) used Dreian-
sichtigkeit repeatedly. Following his apprenticeship in Munich with
Johann Baptist Straub, alongside the younger Bavarian-Austrian
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783), the sculptor now famous
for his grimacing heads, Günther studied at the Vienna Academy
in 1753/54 and trained in the school of Georg Raphael Donner
(1693–1741), Austria’s quintessential late baroque/early classicist
10 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 48.
11 Esther Shalev-Gerz, “Foreword: The Trust Gap,” in Esther Shalev-Gerz: The Con-
temporary Art of Trusting Uncertainties and Unfolding Dialogues, ed. Jason E. Bow-
man (Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing, 2013). See also James E. Young,
“Spaces for Deep Memory: Esther Shalev-Gerz and the First Counter-Monu-
ments,” in Esther Shalev-Gerz, 89–97.
12 For biographical information on Ulrike Truger, her oeuvre, exhibitions, teaching
positions, awards and honors, as well as critiques and interpretations of individ-
ual works or groups of works, see www.ulriketruger.at/ (accessed November 1,
2017).
36 Sissi’s World
sculptor.13 An ecclesiastic example of Dreiansichtigkeit in Günther’s

oeuvre is his Pietà of 1764 in Weyarn, Bavaria. Its three views show
counter-clockwise, first, the greenish gray, dead Christ whose hand
in claw-like rigor mortis is held by Mary; second, the aestheticized
body of Christ whose death is Mary’s pain more than his; and, third,
a mourning putto, caressing the corpse’s shroud and also using it
as a handkerchief to dry his tears, as if to take leave of both Mary
and Christ. Balthasar Permoser’s Apotheose des Prinzen Eugen of 1724
(1720–1724) commissioned for Vienna (Unteres Belvedere, Hall of
Mirrors) is an earlier instance of this Bavarian-Austrian sculptural
structure and vocabulary, here as a three-in-one figure.14 Yet another
example, neither figurative nor entirely abstract, is the sculptor and
architect Egid Quirin Asam’s Asamhaus in Munich, next to the Asam
Church, of 1729–1730. Its ground floor’s windowsills mix the three
states of roughly hewn rock, finished form, and ruin, again, not in a
linear, “rise-and-fall” progression, but in tension with one another.
Some of these practices of Dreiansichtigkeit precede and some fol-
low its theorization in the Enlightenment’s aesthetic discourse on
sculpture and masculine virtue—Johann Winckelmann’s Reflections on
the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture of 1755 and Got-
thold Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry of
1766—which used as its quintessential paradigm the Hellenistic Lao-
coön Group. Winckelmann’s account of the sculpture largely ignored
the sons and focused on the central Laocoön figure.15 In it, or him, he
saw not only “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” but an “exemplum
13 Rudolf Kuhn, “Die Dreiansichtigkeit der Skulpturen des Gian Lorenzo Bernini
und des Ignaz Günther,” in Festschrift für Wilhelm Messerer zum 60. Geburtstag,
ed. Klaus Ertz (Cologne: DuMont, 1980); Christiane Hertel, Pygmalion in Bavaria:
Ignaz Günther (1725–1775) and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Art Theory (Univer-
sity Park: Penn State University Press, 2011); Michael Krapf, ed., Franz Xaver
Messerschmidt 1736–1783 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002); Bruno Grimschitz,
Georg Raphael Donner, Der Brunnen am Neuen Markt in Wien (Stuttgart: Philipp
Reclam Jun., 1959).
14 Balthasar Permoser hats gemacht: Der Hofbildhauer in Sachsen (exhibition catalog)
(Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Skulpturensammlung, 2001);
Alfred Stix, Balthasar Permoser: Die Apotheose des Prinzen Eugen (Berlin: Mann,
1964).
15 Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). For modern invocations of both
the sculpture and the debates, see Richard Brilliant, “Le Laocoon moderne et la
primauté des enlacements,” Revue Germanique Internationale 19 (2003): 251–67.
Other comparative studies include H.B. Nisbet, “Laocoon in Germany: The
Reception of the Group since Winckelmann,” Oxford German Studies 10 (1979):
22–63; and Simon Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann,
Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992).
doloris” of tragic and dignified death.16 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s

much later account of the Laocoön Group in 1798 attempts to ignore or
naturalize the classical subject, replacing it by a reading of body lan-
guage, namely, pose, gesture, facial expression, and regard.17 Attending
to all three figures, he sees in three successive stages a simultaneous
decrease of the threat to life, yet increase of psychic tension: death
(the younger son strangled by one snake), struggle (the father bitten
by the second snake and fighting them both), and liberation/escape
(the older son about to free himself). This temporal trajectory would
be open-ended and anticlimactic, were it not for the older son’s role as
the group’s internal viewer. His escape while looking back, his painful
farewell and abandonment of father and brother to their fate, closes the
group and lends it a tragic dimension. This tragic spectatorship defends
Goethe’s Laocoön Group against Schiller’s moral critique of the Kantian
sublime (“On Tragic Art,” 1792), of catharsis compromised by the pleas-
ure of spectacle and voyeurism (such as shipwrecks or executions),18
and it is also categorically different from Winckelmann’s “exemplum
doloris” informed by an empathetic model of “imitatio Christi”: “[B]ut
we wish that we could bear misery like this great man.”19
Goethe’s account of the Laocoön Group orders three terms: death,
struggle, escape. Even as Goethe, like everyone else between the 1530s
and 1960, interprets the sculpture group mistakenly restored with
Laocoön and the younger son’s prosthetic right arms raised high as
if to invoke divine intervention, he strictly focuses on their relations
to each other as all there is. In his account the center, struggle, is per-
petually transitory, in-between death and escape. As such it remains
the older son’s focus of conflicted identification. This secular model of
Dreiansichtigkeit leaves no doubt that Goethe’s external beholders of
the group face a pictorialized main view, yet identify not with Laocoön
but, instead, with the older son as their group-internal surrogate. The
16 Luitpold D. Ettlinger, “Exemplum Doloris: Reflection on the Laocoön Group,”

in De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss
(New York: NYU Press, 1961); Barbara Maria Stafford, “Beauty of the Invisi-
ble: Winckelmann and the Aesthetics of Imperceptibility,” Zeitschrift für Kunst-
geschichte 43 (1980): 65–78.
17 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Über Laokoon” (Propyläen, I.1, 1798), in Gedenkausgabe
der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, vol. 13, Schriften zur Kunst, ed. Christian Beutler
(Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1954), 161–74; Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Observations
on the Laocoon,” in Goethe on Art, ed. and trans. John Gage (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1980), 78–88.
18 Without this son and instead one who, too, is attacked, see Goethe, “Observa-
tions,” 172.
19 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in
Painting and Sculpture (1755), complete German text with English translation by
Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton (Lassalle, IL: Open Court, 1987), 34 and 35.
38 Sissi’s World
shift is generative and reproductive of a conflicted spectatorship, thus

ensuring a lineage not of cathartic empathy, but, rather, of voluntary
self-implication, even as we are free to walk away.
What matters here with regard to Truger’s Elisabeth is that in figu-
rative Dreiansichtigkeit no view absorbs another—there is no Hegelian
Aufhebung (sublation)—and that the three views cannot be considered
simultaneous (no Trinity) or simultaneously: one or two remain mostly
out of sight.20 Once we understand this, we recognize the importance of
Truger’s naming of three of her sculpture’s approximate corner points,
as it were, rather than its tangents, a decision clearly conveyed by these
photographs, which Truger herself took. In other words, each view
itself offers a spatial and iconographic in-between. The three-in-one
of Dreiansichtigkeit in Truger’s Elisabeth neither orchestrates the unity
of time and space (pace Lessing), nor does it transcend their disunity.
On the contrary, it deflects or disorients such expectations. At the same
time it heightens the beholder’s search for an internal self-reflection or
identification. In Elisabeth, we might think of Freiheit as the view offer-
ing this internal motif of self-reflective subjectivity. As Elisabeth par-
tially reveals her face by moving her fan away from it, she does this not
so as to look out, face, and acknowledge the spectator; rather, she now
seems to see her fan, to look at or into it as though it were a hand-held
mirror offering a self-representation or acknowledgment.
“Placement Problems” (“Platz-Probleme”)21

The current placement of Elisabeth in the park of the Hermes Villa sug-
gests that there is a main view; so does the mounting of a plaque that
attracts walkers and situates them so that that they face Freiheit. In this
pictorialized perception of the sculpture iconography dominates. It
is the iconography of a woman in a long, closely tailored dress with
pointed bodice and wide skirt, her left arm crossing and separating her
breasts, her hand holding the open fan, her travel cloak doubling as
something like a mold from which she might break forth, while the left
and only half of her face appears as if on an imaginary, recessed screen.
She comes forward and yet is fixed to her fan’s shield and, almost like a
Daphne, to the backdrop of trees and a fork in the path. This placement
suggests an audience lingering before this view, yet motioned onwards
20 This is Kuhn’s insight in “Die Dreiansichtigkeit der Skulpturen,” 240, 242, 243.
On the political potentiality, as “Streitkultur,” of this resistance to “Aufhebung”
in some modern and contemporary monuments, see Berthold Hinz, “Denk-
mäler: Vom dreifachen Fall ihrer ‘Aufhebung,’” in Mo(nu)mente: Formen und
Funktionen ephemerer Denkmäler, edited by Michael Diers, 299–311 (Berlin: Aka
demie Verlag, 1993).
21 “Place problems” or “placement problems.” Ulrike Truger coined this phrase.
Email to the author, October 10, 2016.
by the woman’s gesture, as though she were a signpost pointing away

from and yet also to herself. Approaching Elisabeth from another direc-
tion, a walker might first see the seemingly unworked, “natural” pas-
sages of rock between Freiheit and Flucht that bring each into view. This
side of the sculpture is most reminiscent of the quarried block of rock.
It will make the attentive viewer desire more iconographic definition,
while also binding the three named views back to that block of rock.
In this way representation never seeks to transcend materiality. Disbe-
lief in this refusal or curiosity about it may lead to an actively engaged
ambulatory encounter.
Elisabeth’s current placement meaningfully sustains the preoccu-
pied or casual glance as much as the intensive engagement, the fleet-
ing visual perception as much as the embodied encounter between a
viewer in motion and a sculpture seemingly in motion. While its cur-
rent placement is engaging, its current plaque, not authored by Truger,
is somewhat limiting. It claims that its iconography of freedom includes
an angel’s wing,22 and gestures to the Hermes Villa as the destination
of Flucht and the realization of Freiheit. Such a biographical interpreta-
tion fits Elisabeth into the mold of court ceremonial’s age-old internal
spaces of freedom, the Lustschloss (maison de plaisance) in the country,
the hunting lodge, the park pavilion, spaces of retreat Elisabeth sought
out regularly and restlessly. The attempt to lend Elisabeth/Elisabeth, the
sculpture and the woman, the veneer of convention and convention-
ality, perhaps even more than the green surroundings, naturalized the
empress along with the sculpture when it was moved to Lainz in 2005
without consulting the artist.
Several of Ulrike Truger’s social-political monuments changed sites.
Here I am thinking especially of the Marcus Omofuma Stein of 2002/03,
a square column of African black granite suggesting precariously bal-
anced stacks of paperwork and binders as well as the theme of binding.
Truger made this counter-monument in memory of Marcus Omofuma,
a Nigerian refugee denied asylum first in Germany and then in Austria.
When he resisted his deportation, he was fettered and taped, also over
his face, and suffocated from this taping during his deportation flight
to Bulgaria on May 1, 1999. Truger sited the Marcus Omofuma-Stein first
“illegally” on the Ringstrasse, next to the Wiener Staatsoper on October 1,
2003. She has called it a memorial admonishment of racism (“Rassismus
Mahnmal”) and an “initiative to bring about a more humane and more
22 The plaque’s text elaborates: “Diese Skulptur ist ein Gegenbild zum gängigen
Sisi-Klischee. Die drei Seiten der Skulptur stehen für ihre Persönlichkeit, der
Fächer für den Zwang, der Mantel für die Flucht und der Flügel für die Frei-
heit.” The original plaque stated: “Elisabeth/ Zwang Flucht Freiheit/ Urike Tru-
ger/ 1998–99/ Carrara Statuario Marmor.”
40 Sissi’s World
integrative point of view.”23 After much public debate this “stumbling

block” (“Stein des Anstosses”) was legally sited on the square before the
Museumsquartier, subsequently, in 2014, renamed Platz der Menschen-
rechte, or Human Rights Square.24 Another example is the placement
twice of The Watchwoman or The Guardian (Die Wächterin) of 1987–1988
with a political mission (“im politischen Einsatz”), most provocatively
in 2000 again on the Ringstrasse, in front of the Burgtheater, to pro-
test the “Schwarz-Blaue Koalition” the government coalition then of
the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP, black) with the Freedom Party of
Austria (FPÖ, blue). In 2004, the sculpture’s initially “illegal” place-
ment there was legalized.25 Also of Carrara marble, Die Wächterin bears
some resemblance to Elisabeth and may be seen as a precursor to it. At 3
meters height and 5 tons weight, it is of similar scale, weight, and pro-
portion and shares with Elisabeth a sweeping motion and the semanti-
cally wide-ranging motif of the cloak. Yet in contrast to these examples,
Elisabeth’s move to the Hermes Villa was not a matter of public debate
and also did not meet the artist’s approval. Its placement problem is
that Truger had sought site-specificity for her Elisabeth, namely in front
of the Karlskirche.
Truger sculpted this work in the context of the centennial in 1998 of
Elisabeth’s assassination. Upon completion in 1999, the sculpture was
exhibited in front of the Künstlerhaus. In 2001 the City of Vienna acquired
it and thus the municipal museum, the Wien Museum (on the Karlsplatz),
became its curatorial steward. The municipality agreed to site the work
before the Karlskirche; Kulturstadtrat (municipal cultural advisor) Peter
Marboe claimed in his inauguration ceremony speech in early March
2001 that “it is important that in a city as rich in historical works of art
as Vienna contemporary art is shown and perceived in public space.”26
These words had specific weight after the inauguration just six months
earlier of Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial, Nameless Library
(2000), on Vienna’s Judenplatz.27 Therefore the municipal report of the
event (Rathauskorrespondenz) understated its significance when it claimed
that Elisabeth’s placement before the Karlskirche “provides an accent.”28
23 “anstoss zu einer humanen und integrativen sichtweise.” http://www.no-rac-

ism.net/racismkills/denkmal_truger.htm (site no longer in existence, but
widely referenced).
24 Truger, Monumental Weiblich, 48–55, 92–7.
25 Evelyn Schalk, “Monumentale Widerstände” (2009). Available at: http://www.
ulriketruger.at/html/texte5.htm (accessed November 1, 2017).
26 “Archivmeldung der Rathauskorrespondenz,” Rathauskorrespondenz, March 16,
2001.
27 I thank Diane Silverthorne for this observation, and hope to pursue it in the near
future.
28 Rathauskorrespondenz, March 16, 2001.
If contemporary art accentuates history, it likely does so with specific

goals. For Truger the “karlskirche symbolizes the power with which
also ‘elisabeth’ was confronted as a single combatant.”29 Once sited
there, the sculpture not only referred to her struggle. In its unlikely dia-
logue with Fischer von Erlach’s church finished in 1737, Elisabeth offered
a connection to her dynastic-by-intermarriage ancestor Maria Theresa,
Empress between 1740 and 1780, on account of the Pragmatic Sanction
that her father Karl VI had negotiated with the empire’s electoral col-
lege between 1713 and 1732.30 It was during Vienna’s plague epidemic
of 1713, too, that he vowed to build and dedicate the Karlskirche to
Saint Charles Borromeo for the city’s deliverance from the epidemic.
Elisabeth’s indirect reference to Maria Theresa’s eventual accession by
law and contract to imperial power is one of several gestures toward
her predecessor.
One such gesture is toward the Maria Theresa-Monument by
another Bavarian-Austrian sculptor, Caspar von Zumbusch (1830–
1915, ennobled in 1888) on what was then Museumsplatz between the
Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Naturhistorisches Museum hous-
ing the imperial collections. At over 19 meters height and 44 tons total
weight, this bronze monument on a wide architectural base shows the
enthroned Maria Theresa in charge, as she casts her gaze wide across
the square, gestures to her people(s), and generally faces the Hofburg
across the Ringstrasse, while four equestrian statues of her generals and
four full-length statues of her cabinet members surround and guard her
reign as much as the monument’s support structure. Franz Josef had
commissioned it in 1872, and it took Zumbusch thirteen years to com-
plete it. Some recent travel guides to Vienna mention that Elisabeth was
present at its inauguration on May 13, 1888, coinciding with what would
have been Maria Theresa’s 171st birthday.31 This seemingly discon-
nected “fun fact” has its foundation in the detailed reports in the press
in Vienna and throughout the Empire, mainly on May 14 and 15, 1888,
29 Urike Truger, email to the author, October 10, 2016.

30 Maria Theresia und ihre Zeit, 1740–1780 (exhibition catalog) (Schloß Schönbrunn,
Vienna, 1980), 34–6.
31 “1888 wurde es unter Anwesenheit der Kaiserin Sissi feierlich enthüllt,”
City-Walks (website). Available at: http://www.city-walks.info/Wien/
Maria-Theresien-Platz.html (accessed November 1, 2017). “Bei den Feierlich-
keiten anläßlich der Enthüllung des Denkmals war auch Kaiserin Elisabeth
anwesend, ein Faktum, das zu diesem Zeitpunkt nicht mehr selbstverständlich
war,” Stadtflaneur (site no longer available), http://www.stadtflaneur.at/index.
php/ringstrasse/32-maria-theresia-denkmal. The website Kunst und Kultur
in Wien, Hedwig Abraham Guide provides a detailed introduction to the mon-
ument and its history: “Sogar Kaiserin Elisabeth wohnte der Enthüllung bei,
auch ihr Sohn Rudolf….” Available at: http://www.viennatouristguide.at/
42 Sissi’s World
on this enormously elaborate ceremony, which was rightly compared

with Vienna’s Corpus Christi procession.32 At their core these accounts
focus on “the Emperor and the Empress,” their clothes, the choreog-
raphy of their appearance and comportment, first during high mass
which they celebrated in the court tent (“Hofzelt”), along with the altar
erected near the monument’s base, then during the actual “unveiling”
from “Roman blinds-like draperies that hung from sixteen high masts,”
at which point Franz Josef bared his head to greet “his great ancestor
in her likeness.”33 All reports note their majesties’ gracious address of
the artists and craftsmen involved, then their ambulatory procession
around the monument, “from left to right,” i.e., counter-clockwise.34
“During the ambulatory procession lively cheers sounded from all
grandstands, which Their Majesties graciously returned.”35 After the
military parade on the Ringstrasse the court returned to the Hofburg
and held a family dinner along a single table for the sixty-five members
of the House of Habsburg gathered for this showcase of dynastic power,
honor, and unity of the Familia Augusta. In the evening they attended a
gala celebration at the Staatsoper ending with the appearance on stage
of a pictorial rendering of the Maria Theresa monument, “just as it had
been unveiled in the morning on the Museumsplatz.”36 Most newspa-
pers emphasize Elisabeth’s presence and participation in the morning’s
event and the fact that, like Franz Josef, she spoke with the artists: “The
Empress, too, directed friendly words toward the artist” (that is, Zum-
busch).37 They report on the people’s excitement and gratitude for the
exceptional and by then unusual gift of the attendance of “Her Majesty
the Empress, whose majestic appearance evoked general admiration.”38
While several excuse Elisabeth’s absence from the Staatsoper gala on
Ring/Denkmal_Bild/z_mt.htm (accessed November 1, 2017). Markus Kris-

tan’s account is relatively brief in his “Denkmäler der Gründerzeit in Wein,”
in Steinernes Bewußtsein, vol. 1, Die öffentliche Repräsentation staatlicher und natio
naler Identität Österreichs in seinen Denkmälern, ed. Stefan Riesenfellner (Vienna:
Böhlau Verlag, 1998), 96 (Published in conjunction with the exhibition, Steinernes
Bewußtsein, Graz, 1998). On the sculpted, monumental state portrait, see also
Martin Warnke, “Triviale Herrscherbildnisse: Zur Entwicklung politischer Po
pularität,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 38 (2011): 7–24.
32 The newspaper articles quoted (in translation) in the following are accessible
at ANNO: Historische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, Austrian Newspapers Online,
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. Available at: http://anno.onb.
ac.at/ (accessed November 1, 2017).
33 Neue Freie Presse, Vienna, May 14, 1888 (evening edition).
34 Die Presse, Vienna, May 14, 1888.
35 Tages-Post, Linz, May 15, 1888.
36 Mährisches Tagblatt, Olmütz, May 14, 1888.
37 Prager Tagblatt, May 14, 1888.
38 Die Presse, Wien, May 14, 1888.
account of “a minor indisposition,” some do not. What she missed was

the apotheosis of Maria Theresa, like herself beloved and popular, but
in so many ways different from her. If at the end of that day Elisabeth
avoided the public comparison with this Maria Theresa, during the
inauguration family dinner, she nevertheless claimed a direct rapport
with her, according to Count Corti’s biography, when she admonished
crown prince Rudolf, whose conduct toward his younger sister Valerie
concerned her: “I am a Sunday’s child, so I am in communion with the
other world and can bring good or bad luck to others. And so I remind
you of May 13.”39 This enigmatic admonition appears to imply that
Maria Theresa’s imperial legacy potentially included Valerie.
If Elisabeth admonished her son with a concern for his, his sis-
ter’s and, implicitly, the empire’s well-being inherited from Maria
Theresa, the Tages-Post admonished the Habsburg family as much as
the Austrian parliament as follows: “Might May 13 not form a leg-
acy for today’s government? … Not solely to persons, but to their
principles does one erect monuments. What ennobled Theresa’s life,
and lent her name grandeur, is the achievement of Austria’s unity, the
foundation of freedom in this state … ” In 1888 this unifying “main
view” of Zumbusch’s Maria Theresa was interpreted as follows: she
is about thirty-five years old, dressed in the “pompous costume of her
time,” in her left hand holds the imperial scepter and “the Pragmatic
Sanction, the guarantee of imperial unity, while the calm gesture of
her right hand felicitously expresses mild guidance and firm order-
ing.”40 When Franz Josef and Elisabeth modeled the viewing of this
monumental sculpture for its inaugural audience in their procession
around it, they were dwarfed by it and likely saw little. At the same
time they demonstrated dynastic power as much as a viewing atti-
tude of veneration and awe, but certainly not of encounter. Engage-
ment with this sculpture meant engagement with its program by the
historian Alfred von Arneth. The allegorical figures perched on the
corners of Maria Theresa’s throne were generally legible in 1888: Jus-
tice and Clemency, in keeping with Maria Theresa’s personal motto:
“Justitia et Clementia,” further Wisdom, and Constancy. This appa-
ratus of externalized virtues is as different as possible from Zwang—
Flucht—Freiheit, and nothing could be farther from Truger’s work
than to suggest the allegorical concept of personification. And yet,
between 2001 and 2005 Elisabeth was not far from this imperial mon-
ument, “accenting” the ex-voto church promised for Vienna’s escape
39 Egon Corti, Elizabeth Empress of Austria, trans. Catherine Alison Phillips (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937), 377.
40 Mährisches Tagblatt Olmütz, May 14, 1888.
44 Sissi’s World
from the plague. Compared to Zumbusch’s monument, Elisabeth is

emphatically a not-Maria Theresa and yet is also strangely present in
her stead. Elisabeth acknowledges human vulnerability and thereby
speaks to the Karlskirche’s original function, though hardly the impe-
rial power conveyed by its forms.
What strongly linked the sitters of these very different imperial por-
traits is their passion for horseback riding and their identification with
Hungary. For Maria Theresa, the one almost presupposed the other,
as the Hungarian coronation ceremony included riding up the coro-
nation hill in then Pozsony/Pressburg. Maria Theresa refused to be
crowned empress, and publicly identified as Queen of Hungary. (She
was crowned King, not Queen, of Hungary in June 1741.)41 So did Elis-
abeth, whose elective and affective affinity with Hungary is both his-
tory and legend, and conveyed in her sculpted portrait monuments in
Hungary and Slovakia.42 Elisabeth had advocated for the Hungarian
“Compromise” (“Ausgleich”), and she and Franz Josef were crowned
Queen and King of Hungary in 1867, 125 years after Maria Theresa,
in St. Matthias Basilica in Buda. Yet in 1888, even as Hungarian del-
egations had a prominent presence in the monument’s inauguration
ceremony, Hungary was not to be privileged in Zumbusch’s work;
its sole reference to Hungary is a coat of arms on the throne’s back.43
For Carl Schorske, the Maria Theresa-Monument was a project of con-
servative liberalism, thus a generally, rather than specifically, inclusive
41 Maria Theresia und ihre Zeit, 71–9; Michael Yonan, Empress Maria Theresia and the
Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press, 2011), 16–20, 25–33; and Jeremy Howard, East European Art (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 11–20.
42 On the monumental cult of Elisabeth, see Judith Szapor’s essay in this volume
and, on Elisabeth’s modern reception in Hungary, her earlier article, “From
‘Guardian Angel of Hungary’ to the ‘Sissi Look-Alike Contest’: The Making and
Re-Making of the Cult of Elizabeth, Queen of Hungary,” in Gender and Moder-
nity in Central Europe; The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Its Legacy, ed. Aga-
tha Schwartz (Ottawa: The University of Ottawa Press, 2010). See Howard, East
European Art, 43–4, on patriotic or nationalist Millennium Monument (1894–
1929) in Budapest by György Zala and others, but not one of Zala’s several Eli
sabeth monuments, and 20–3, on the St. Elizabeth Church, or Blue Church, in
Pozsony/Pressburg, now Bratislava.
43 Hedwig Abraham, Kunst und Kultur in Wien (website), http://www.vienna-
touristguide.at/Ring/Denkmal_Bild/z_mt.htm (accessed November 1, 2017).
The section “Kaiserin mit Diadem” quotes the historian Alfred Ritter von
Arneth’s program for the project: “Es sei darauf zu achten, dass nicht etwa
ein nach ungarischer Manier verziertes Kleide gewählt werde,” let alone the
Hungarian crown. On the Hungarian delegations, see Kristan, “Denkmäler der
Gründerzeit,” 99.
compromise.44 Also in this sense, the Elisabeth present at its inaugura-

tion could hardly experience an encounter on an equal footing.
Truger recognizes the empresses’ shared affinity with Hungary in a
particularly interesting way. She counters not only Zumbusch’s Maria
Theresa-Monument, but also its make-over in Secessionist style and white
Laas marble, i.e. the elaborately framed and horizontally grounded foun-
tain-cum-enthroned Elisabeth in the Volksgarten monument dedicated on
June 4, 1907 in the old emperor’s presence. That monument, by the sculp-
tor Hans Bitterlich and the architect Friedrich Ohmann, was the result of a
competition, whose jury included Bitterlich’s teacher Zumbusch himself as
well as Ohmann. As Bitterlich recalled twenty-five years later, there were
few portraits to use for his purposes. He had sometimes encountered Eli
sabeth on her walks, “though already back then she always carried a fan,
behind which she hid her face at any stranger’s approach … I fought a bit-
ter battle with the Empress’s ladies-in-waiting, as they absolutely wanted
to see the Empress represented with the above-mentioned obligatory fan.”45
While Bitterlich won his “bitter battle” and represented Elisabeth in an
imaginary private moment of reading on a garden bench flanked by two
lazy dogs, Truger has granted the ladies-in-waiting their wish and perhaps
also Elisabeth’s. At the same time, Truger’s Elisabeth also resonates with the
most famous sculpted state portrait of Maria Theresa as Queen of Hungary
during her lifetime, the life-size statue in cast pewter and copper of 1766
by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (Unteres Belvedere, Wien) (Figure 2.4). The
Empress had commissioned it from the recent graduate of the Vienna Art
Academy in 1764, and soon added the commission of the pendant, commem-
orative statue of Emperor Franz Stephan, who died in 1765, also completed
in 1766.46 To be sure, there is no emphatic “Dreiansichtigkeit” in this Maria
Theresa, yet there is correspondence, both in affirmation and in contrast,
between Truger’s Elisabeth and Messerschmidt’s Maria Theresa, between
44 Carl E. Schorske, “Museum in Contested Space: The Sword, the Scepter, and the
Ring,” in Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1998); discussion of the monument 117–21.
See also Karl Oetinger, Renate Wagner-Rieger, Franz Fuhrmann, and Alfred
Schmeller, Reclams Kunstführer Oesterreich: Wien, Niederösterreich, Oberösterreich,
Burgenland (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1974), 1: 587: “Der mächtige Platz
zwischen ihnen wird durch das monumentale Denkmal der Kaiserin Maria
Theresia von Zumbusch (von Karl Kundmann im wesentlichen 1887 vollendet)
glücklich beherrscht.”
45 Hans Bitterlich, “Wie das Kaiserin-Elisabeth Denkmal entstand,” Neues Wiener
Journal, June 5, 1932, 6. What Bitterlich created is acknowledged as the icon Eli
sabeth in Karl Oetinger et al., Reclams Kunstführer Oesterreich, 1: 600: “mit der
Thronfigur der schönen Kaiserin.”
46 Maria Theresia und ihre Zeit, 17–19; Maria Pötzl-Malikova, “Die Statuen Maria
Theresias und Franz I. Stephans von Lothringen von Franz Xaver Messer-
schmidt: Ein Beitrag zur typologischen Ableitung des spätbarocken Herrscher-
bildes,” Wiener Jahrbuch 34, no. 1 (1981): 131–45.
46 Sissi’s World
raised scepter and raised fan, between their dresses’ pointed bodices and,
most important perhaps, in each figure’s embodied energy. Messerschmidt
presents Maria Theresa in motion, in full, measured, stride. Truger presents
Elisabeth in motion in all three approximate views, in Zwang, where dra-
pery in motion enfolds her, and in Freiheit, where it swerves toward her
right hip, so to speak, and in Flucht, where all forms and shapes coalesce in
a heavy surge forward. Forward from Elisabeth’s position, but away from
the beholder, who thus becomes a placeholder for the source of her flight or
at least feels left behind. Again, there is no dominant motion or bodily ges-
ture. But as in Messerschmidt’s Maria Theresa, there is dignity in Elisabeth’s
motion, especially in the forceful gravity of Flucht.
Figure 2.4 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Maria Theresa as Queen of

Hungary, 1766, Wien, Unteres Belvedere. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource,
New York).
In-Between
Elisabeth—Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit is not Truger’s only work sited in
public space titled in this way. Such threefold naming occurred in Der
Steinerne Fluss—Quelle—Welle—Wasserfall (The Stone River—Source—
Wave—Waterfall) of 1991 in Hartberg, Steiermark, Truger’s hometown.
This work allows a creek covered by an urban pedestrian zone to resur-
face as rock formation and in mere traces of re-emerging water and in
three discrete parts spanning from source to disappearance.47 The mid-
dle term Welle is the moment in which Der Steinerne Fluss most seems to
come into its own and yet this moment is necessarily fleeting. Formally
and structurally less comparable perhaps to Elisabeth is GIGANT—
Mensch—Macht—Würde (GIANT—Human Being—Power—Dignity)
of 2009, another three-in-one monument, about human rights.48 This
one the artist again sited “illegally” on the Ringstrasse, in front of the
Musikverein facing the Karlskirche across the large Karlsplatz. Elisabeth
stands between these two works, completed within a decade’s distance
from each and partaking of the mimetic quality of the earlier work as
much as of the latter’s abstraction. Thereby, Elisabeth resists a trend
observed by the art critic Michael Casey in his review of Object versus
Space, an exhibition of contemporary Austrian sculpture at the Nordic
Arts Center in Helsinki, November 1992 (Form Function Finland). He
writes,
In Austrian sculpture today it would appear that there are few

signs of a return to the literal or figurative object. The fragmented
nature of contemporary society, its multiplicity of creeds and
beliefs, and its wide spectrum of aesthetic prejudices and political
opinions has meant that much of this sculpture must be abstract.49
Thus Casey posits abstraction as a necessity in Austrian sculpture of

the 1990s, not the potentially evasive choice Schorske might have seen
in it, had he taken a scholarly interest in it. For Casey abstraction was
the necessary response to the fact that in Austria as elsewhere concep-
tual, installation, and performance art had become the new sculptural
arts of content in the 1960s and 1970s.50 What seemed to remain of
47 Truger, Monumental Weiblich, 14–23.

48 Truger, Monumental Weiblich, 100–9.
49 Michael Casey, “Contemporary Austrian Sculpture: Object versus Space,” Form
Function Finland 14, no. 1 (1993): 54–6.
50 It is important to recognize that Truger’s repeated practice of “illegal” siting,
while undoubtedly containing a social-political surprise effect, does not align
her work with that of the Aktionisten in the 1960s and 1970s, whose sculp-
tural medium was the temporal/spatial and mobile/temporary use of their
body as “lebende Skulptur.” See Werner Hofmann, “Die Wiener Aktionisten,”
48 Sissi’s World
autonomous, material sculpture was form, perhaps mere form. In our

context Casey’s critique is less interesting for his certainty of this divide
than for its obvious contradiction by Truger’s artistic practice. As the
works introduced here for comparison with Elisabeth demonstrate, for
Truger, her medium, rock—often, but not always the “classical” Carrara
marble—is not solely a means of representation, but a material with an
inherent ability to embody and articulate especially those aspects of her
sculpture that are less conceptual than sensual and emotional.
To understand Elisabeth’s sculptural language, between the literal or
figurative on the one hand and abstraction on the other, we need to ask
how it physically and sensually invites and engages our encounter with
it. Elisabeth’s Dreiansichtigkeit may seem to match sculpture suitably
with a primarily visual perception aesthetic and thus to the implied,
nominal spectator. Yet the real, embodied spectator attends to sculpture
not only visually, but also experiences its physical presence, in material-
ity, weight, scale, form, and surface. In Elisabeth’s case, such experience
is in harmony as well as disharmony with the work’s iconography in
several ways. The subtitle, Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit, makes us look for
iconographic counterparts and three distinctive views. As we saw, the
sculpture welcomes and sustains this approach but also counters and
even confuses it, for Elisabeth’s actual views change the order of terms,
and also do not indicate where exactly one concept ends and another
begins. Instead they may fuse and separate differently during differ-
ent encounters, under different conditions of weather, light, and sea-
son as much as a viewer’s disposition. Accordingly, one’s perception of
approximate seams between the three views will likely change or shift.
The identification of iconographic motifs—such as face, arm, fan,
bodice, cloak—depends on their recognizability and thus on the impu-
tation of mimetic intention. Such recognition seeks a one-to-one resem-
blance—for example, “it” looks like a fan—or relies on biographical
knowledge or cliché, such as Elisabeth’s—habitual, shielding, hiding—
use of her fan.51 Elisabeth allows both kinds of identification, even as
the fan suggests self-reflection. Some motifs are indisputable, others are
ambiguous. Is the cloak a cloak? Is the maybe-cloak a frame, a shelter,
a wing, or a space of confinement? Is the almost pleated skirt just a
skirt or also another fan enfolding the woman? Yet others are entirely
Kunstforum International 89 (1987): 202–11; for the term “lebende Skulptur,”

see Mein Körper ist das Ereignis: Wiener Aktionismus & Internationale Performance
(Exhibition catalogue), Museum Moderner Kunst Wien, Stiftung Ludwig Wien
(Vienna: Mumok, 2015), n. pag.
51 See the room titled “Die Flucht” at the Hofburg’s Sisi-Museum. Available at:
http://www.hofburg-wien.at/wissenswertes/sisi-museum/rundgang-durch-
das-sisi-museum/die-flucht.html (accessed November 1, 2017).
uncertain. Does this shape allude to hair, the famous long, beautiful,
shiny hair groomed over two and a half hours daily, or is this just rock,
the quarried rock into which Elisabeth might retreat even as she seems
to emerge from it? Is it both, hair and retreat? The sculpture’s different
levels of mimetic finish seem to tease us. Next to the skirt’s roughly
embossed surface is the finely finished elegant point of a corset-like
bodice quite roughly surfaced further up to suggest ample breasts. The
one we can see only from close up, the other we see from farther away.
This pointy finish associates eighteenth-century court fashion and thus
Habsburg and Bavarian feminine ancestry along with publicly watched
fecundity, a close eye kept on the empress as the bearer of heirs and
dynastic continuity.
The differing, even contrasting forms and textures of Elisabeth can
generally be considered supportive indicators of their non-linear
dynamic: they do not deny biographical association and historical com-
parison, yet encourage these as fragmentary or localized reflection.
Furthermore, its surface treatment connects Elisabeth to process art, as
the work’s appearance seems to record its genesis. Conventionally that
process from rough to refined is understood as entelechy. Here it might
be tempting to see a force leading Elisabeth from captivity to freedom,
but as we have seen, the sculpture’s actual sequence of views does not
allow for this. Instead, even when perceived as resulting from a force
within, the localized shift from finished to seemingly unfinished, and
from literal or figurative representation to abstraction, accomplishes
two things. This work resists pictorialization, a common means of for-
getting sculpture’s materiality; thus it resists iconicity, here: Elisabeth’s
iconicity. Second, it offers what so far I have called in-betweenness as
two possible processes, becoming and something like unbecoming, an
emergence from and a disappearance into the block of Carrara marble.
While Flucht and Freiheit oscillate in this way, Zwang does not—cannot—
pair with rock’s seemingly natural state, as it does with the other two
views. There is no one moment we can call Elisabeth/Elisabeth’s coming
into its, or her, own. Beholders may variously consider these oscillations
in relation to problems of monumental sculpture in the 1990s, aspects of
Elisabeth’s entire life, or to her assassination, or, on some days, to their
own experiences. This is possible also because the sculpture avoids the
invocation of Elisabeth’s dignified death, her “exemplum doloris,” priv-
ileged in her biographies and their illustrations.52 An encounter with
52 For example, Corti, Elizabeth, chapter XV, “Elisabeth and Lucheni,” especially
476–80; and Lisa Fischer, Schattenwürfe in die Zukunft: Kaiserin Elisabeth und die
Frauen ihrer Zeit (Vienna: Böhlau, 1998), chapter “Weltschmerz und Todessehn-
sucht,” 178–84. The Sisi Museum begins its online “Rundgang durch das
50 Sissi’s World
the minimally tooled block in the passages between Freiheit and Flucht
potentially offers a turning point, be it the beholder’s from clockwise to
counter-clockwise ambulatory viewing, or be it between the concepts
and experiences of Freiheit and Flucht. Above all, it reminds us of its
material, rock, and of our own suspended expectations.53
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Three
The Remains of the Stay:
The Corporeal Archive of
Empress Elisabeth in the Hofburg
Beth Ann Muellner
III
I awoke with this marble head in my hands;
it exhausts my arms, and I don’t know where to put it down.
It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream,
so our life became one, and it will be very difficult for it to separate
again.
I look at the eyes; neither open nor closed;

I speak to the mouth which keeps trying to speak;
I hold the cheeks which have broken through the skin;
that’s all I’m able to do.
My hands disappear and come towards me

mutilated.
—George Sefaris, from “Mythistorema” (1900–1971)
Why begin an essay about the Sisi Museum in Vienna’s Hofburg

with the most famous stanza of twentieth-century Greek poet Sefaris’
“Mythistorema?” Sisi fans will immediately recognize poetry and the
Greek language as two of the empress’s greatest passions,1 but more
importantly, they will be familiar with the interweaving of the past and
present as personal experience and collective cultural memory that are
1 Sisi’s Greek tutor Constantin Christomanos became one of the empress’s closest
confidants, teaching her Greek during the daily three-hour ritual of styling her
waist-length mass of hair. His published diaries, Tagebuchblätter: Erinnerungen
des Hauslehrers von Kaiserin Elisabeth (Vienna: Czernin, [1903] 2007), provide a
unique glimpse of daily life inside Sisi’s world.
54 Sissi’s World
reflected; for this interchange is primary in the production of nostalgia.

In the Sisi Museum’s focus on the life—or more specifically the death—
of Empress Elisabeth, nostalgia reigns supreme.2 Like the marble head
of the poem that burdens and perplexes the student of history in its
detached state, visitors to the Sisi Museum are greeted by the empress’s
ghostly-white death mask at its entrance with a similar puzzle: “where
to put” that relic of history; how to untangle our nostalgic engage-
ment and complicity in the making of history, our hands “mutilated”
in abstract and literal ways? Unlike the poem, whose stasis leaves the
reader in a paralyzed dream-state (“that’s all I’m able to do”), the con-
temporary museum offers visitors an interactive experience with the
nostalgia of the past.3 By definition, “nostalgia (nostos—return home,
and algia—longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has
never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it
is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.”4 In this chapter I explore our
complicity in the fantasy of Sisi using the evidence of my own visits to
the Sisi Museum and those of others via commentary on social media.5
In seeking to understand how the museum functions as intermediary
between personal memory and collective experience, the body (both
Sisi’s and the visitor’s) is a central factor. The museum’s theatrical lay-
out and storytelling approach engages the visitor’s sensorial/affective
response to both evoke and disrupt the production of nostalgia.
The Sisi Museum’s appeal to the senses and to bodily affect aligns
with what Hilde Hein argues in The Museum in Transition, namely that
contemporary museums have shifted from being solely sites for the col-
lection and exhibition of valued objects to sites focused on “the busi-
ness of producing experiences … [t]he measure of the museum is taken
by the intensity of the experience it commands and the degree to which
that experience ‘feels real.’”6 To the over six million visitors to the Sisi
museum since its opening in 2004, the majority of whom are young
women (65 percent), the exhibition’s layout and display of material
2 On nostalgia and Habsburg history, see Heidi Schlipphacke, “The Temporali-

ties of Habsburg Nostalgia,” Journal of Austrian Studies 47, no. 2 (Summer 2014):
1–16.
3 On recent strategies of contemporary museums, see Jonathan Bach, “Object
Lessons: Visuality and Tactility in Museums,” in Exhibiting the German Past:
Museums, Film, and Musealization, eds. Peter M. McIsaac and Gabriele Mueller
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), specifically the section titled “Strat-
egies of Authenticity,” 128–31.
4 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xviii.
5 While social media can encompass many things, my definition revolves around
the ability for users to engage in dialogue with one another.
6 Hilde Hein, The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Washington
DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), x–xi.
The Corporeal Archive of Empress Elisabeth 55
objects reveals an intimate encounter with the past and contributes to

what many visitors understand as a helpful correction to the histori-
cal record. Visitor comments from the Sisi Museum Facebook page and
from travel sites TripAdvisor and Yelp from 2010 to the present serve
as examples of what Walter Benjamin calls “innervative” responses, or
those affective and physical responses that historical production in the
cinema or museum (as prime examples) can bring about.7
My visits to the Sisi Museum on three different occasions awakened
me to striking differences in the ways royal women are historicized
within their former living spaces in different countries.8 One of the
more cinematic features at the palace in Gödöllő for example, newly
renovated in 1996, is the focus on Sisi as an equestrian, particularly
the details in the stables and riding arena, where a digitized image of
a horse projected on a screen in one of the stalls makes history come
alive.9 While the cultural and economic decisions of national tourist
industries to display and historically narrate women’s lives is an anal-
ysis that exceeds my current focus, even the most casual observation
reveals the focus on corporeality found in the Sisi Museum in Vienna to
be most unique, one that in its woman-centered narrative and interac-
tive approach might even be called feminist.10
In a cursory glance at 2016 TripAdvisor reviews of the museum,
for example, the display of an article of clothing worn by the empress
evokes a sense of nostalgia that merges the empress’s public history
with that of individual (physical) memory and emotion, as expressed
by ZQazi: “The black coat which covered Sisi after her assassina-
tion on Lake Geneva and in which she was taken to the Hotel Beau
7 Based on information provided on social media sites, a large number of responses

come from visitors outside of Austria (such as Brazil, China, India) with a higher
response rate from Western Europe and the United States, based most likely on
the familiarity with and origin of Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Facebook in the U.S.
See also the insider/outsider discussion in Hein’s chapter “Museums and Com-
munities,” The Museum in Transition, 39.
8 I visited the Sisi Museum twice during my 2008–09 sabbatical year in Vienna,
and once more recently on a tour through Austria (Vienna), Hungary (Gödöllő),
and Romania (Sinaia and Bukarest) in 2014.
9 For more on Sisi in Hungary, see Judith Szapor and András Lénárt, “Sisi Redux:
the Empress Elisabeth and Her Cult in Post-Communist Hungary” in this vol-
ume.
10 Hilde Hein’s feminist approaches to museum curation include: the disruption
of systems of classification; the acknowledgment of the corporeal character of
thought; the recognition of emotion as a complex phenomenon related to cog-
nitive history and understanding; the challenge to hierarchies; and the balance
between objective and subjective viewpoints. See her article “Looking at Muse-
ums from a Feminist Perspective,” in Gender, Sexuality and Museums: A Routledge
Reader, ed. Amy K. Levin (New York: Routledge, 2010).
56 Sissi’s World
Rivage … was really sad and disturbing to see as I, living in Geneva

[have] been to this hotel a few times and often pass by.” Ramesh B.
reflects: “[The museum] has all personal items of Elisabeth … from this
visit one comes to know about Elisabeth (Sisi) in details … her melan-
choly, frustration with royal lifestyle, anthrophobia, … very well laid
out … ” The comment made by mansiarora2016 matches perfectly the
Hofburg’s marketing objective that promises an encounter with the
authentic: “her numerous personal objects depict the true personality
of the frequently misunderstood Empress.” And in a 2016 Sisi Museum
Facebook comment, an emphasis on affect indicates the museum’s
encouragement to see and feel as eyewitness to history.11 But can “per-
sonal items” and “details” really get at the empress’s “true personal-
ity”? How do they function within the museum to “dispel myths”? And
finally, how does the innervated body participate?
Both thematically and ideologically, the Sisi museum’s theatrical,
storytelling approach presents a narrative that engages visitors on mul-
tiple fronts, inviting them to “make meanings of their own, turning
objects into fuzzily bounded zones of potentiality.”12 Co-curators and
directors Olivia Lichtscheidl and Michael Wohlfahrt use layout, light-
ing, sounds, words, and images to build on renowned set designer Rolf
Langenfass’s theatrical/cinematic design to tell the empress’s story,
awakening visitors’ senses in their encounter with her most personal
possessions in six thematic spaces, beginning with “Death,” and then
moving to “The Sisi Myth,” “Girlhood,” “At Court,” “Flight,” and
finally ending with “Assassination.” Whereas theatrical and cinematic
elements in museums are often critiqued for their trivialization of his-
tory and promotion of the affective over distancing modes of reception,
these elements can also allow visitors to feel close to the empress’s “true
personality,” revealing her flaws and humanness.13 The museum’s ide-
ological commitment to documenting the heritage of an individual
who would otherwise represent an “exotic minority” or “subordinate
other” via modes of active visitor participation also reflects the shift
towards more democratizing, feminist principles of the contemporary
museum.14 Creating a sense of community around a subject of history
11 Karin Lore Schmuckli, Sisi Museum Facebook page, 2016, my italics.

12 Hein, The Museum in Transition, 55.
13 For more on connections between cinema and museums, see Peter M. McIsaac
and Gabriele Mueller, Exhibiting the German Past: Museums, Film, and Musealiza-
tion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).
14 Hein, “Looking at Museums,” 46; also Hein, The Museum in Transition. The
museum’s focus on one of the lesser-known female figures of Habsburg his-
tory no doubt contributes to the relatively recent cult-like adoration of prin-
cesses and queens in general (Diana, Elisabeth, Disney, etc.), the feminist merits
of which are a bit stretched if feminism is defined strictly as the attainment of
previously scorned (as Sisi was) gives rise to a “collective script for
individual longing.”15
As likely is evident by now, I take an interdisciplinary approach to
the museum and build on feminist, cultural, and performance stud-
ies, inspired by Svetlana Boym’s book The Future of Nostalgia, Susan
Stewart’s book-length study On Longing, and Diana Taylor’s book The
Archive and the Repertoire.16 These thinkers, like the feminist museum
studies scholar Hilde Hein, all of whom are ultimately influenced by
the work of Walter Benjamin, ask the fundamental question of how
everyday objects create or perform history. Like them, I am intrigued
by a “more curious look at … the marginalized, ephemeral phenomena
of everyday life and leisure culture,”17 perhaps more succinctly sum-
marized in Siegfried Kracauer’s claim that: “ … access to the truth is by
way of the profane.”18 The Sisi museum’s focus on the empress’s body
itself (and its various accoutrements)—or perhaps more appropriately
its focus on absences—and the exhibition’s appeal to visual, aural, and
tactile senses, fulfills a search for the type of authenticity that relies on
the balance between “fact and fiction”: as the Hofburg museum’s web-
site claims, in studying the empress’s artifacts in close proximity, vis-
itors can come to understand “the real personality of the empress.”19
Broadly speaking, my exploration moves from presence, to abstraction,
to absence. After brief consideration of terms such as innervation and
nostalgia, I begin with an exploration of the spaces of the museum and
how the theatrical and spatial aspects have an impact on visitors’ expe-
riences of nostalgia; I then take a step back from the museum to reflect
gender equality, which is not the case here. I am interested in Sisi as a figure
whose history defies the canonical Habsburg history that otherwise dominates
museum collections throughout Europe (as reflective of the power of the Holy
Roman Empire). Indeed, the fact that various historical objects of Sisi’s personal
life have been auctioned away into other national collections provides evidence
of a kind of sweeping into the dustbin of Sisi remnants in contrast to more tradi-
tional Habsburg treasures. Sisi’s cartes-de-visite collection auctioned to the Lud-
wig Museum in Cologne, Germany serves as one example. See Beth Muellner,
“The Empress Elisabeth of Austria and her Untidy Collection,” Women’s Studies:
An Inter-Disciplinary Journal 39, no. 6 (2010): 536–61.
15 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 42.
16 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia; Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Min-
iature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1993); and Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural
Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
17 Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Critical
Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 315.
18 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornamen: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y.
Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 201.
19 The Hofburg Museum website is available at: www.hofburg.at
58 Sissi’s World
more abstractly on how Stewart’s metaphors of the miniature and the

gigantic figure in Sisi’s nostalgic image; and finally, I conclude my anal-
ysis by exploring the meaning of an important missing artifact, and in
investigating post-visit reverberations of nostalgia constructed in social
media reviews and in the souvenir shop, as well as in the ghostly photo-
graphic apparitions of the empress that appear outside of the Sisi spaces.
My interest in Benjamin’s concept of mimetic innervation, a somatic
and sensory experience of the museum’s design as akin to that of cin-
ema-goers, is informed by Miriam Hansen’s studies on Benjamin and
Kracauer.20 The concept of innervation “refers, broadly, to a neurophys-
iological process that mediates between internal and external, psychic
and motoric, human and mechanical registers.”21 But more simply
put, it reflects a museum visitor’s subjective or affective response to
that which Hein calls the museum experience.22 In Hein’s mapping
of museum typologies, the history museum (the category that best
describes the Sisi museum) reflects “the ambiguous middle ground
between objectivity and subjectivity where cognition and feeling, fact
and value, intermingle,”23 where the museum must “compet[e] for the
public’s allegiance with such manufacturers of illusion as movies, tel-
evision, theme parks, and advertising.”24 Thus, like museum strategies
of the past twenty years such as those explored in Peter McIsaac’s and
Gabriele Mueller’s Exhibiting the German Past, the Sisi museum’s adop-
tion of various cinematic and theatrical strategies reflects an experience
of the past that ultimately passes through the body, producing that
familiar shiver of nostalgia.25
The museum, like the cinema, offers darkened, contained spaces that
have the capacity to lull viewers/visitors into a state of reverie, compla-
cency, and longing for the past, devoid of any critical or ironic stance.
Unlike the cinema, however, the museum-goer’s movement through
space allows for a much different experience, for as the museum’s nar-
rative unfolds relative to the selection of objects and their display, it
also shifts according to each visitor’s individual meandering, none of
20 I like the term innervation because of its evocation of the body’s interconnec-
tivity in experience (physical sensation→nerves→brain→emotional/cognitive
response). I rely on Hansen’s exploration of Walter Benjamin’s term “innerva-
tion” because it is otherwise left out in the final publication of his essay “On
the Mimetic Faculty,” in Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobi-
ographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1978), 331–6.
21 Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema,” 314.
22 Hein, The Museum in Transition, 66–7.
25 McIsaac and Mueller, Exhibiting the German Past.
which is precisely the same in each case.26 These individual (private)

experiences can also allow for deeply subjective interpretations of an
ostensibly national (public) history: “The meaning of objects oscil-
lates wildly from user to observer and between distinct communities,
regardless of the museum’s endeavors to exert a standardizing control.
The controversies provoked by such polyvocality must be approached
from the vantages of all the communities that museums serve and rep-
resent.”27 The polyvocality allows for unique engagements with the
past, for as Boym argues, while “[l]onging might be what we share as
human beings, […] that doesn’t prevent us from telling very different
stories of belonging and nonbelonging.”28
Boym engages with polyvocality in The Future of Nostalgia in her dis-
cussion of two “tendencies” of nostalgia that emerge in our pursuit of the
past: restorative nostalgia—concerned with rebuilding the past through
an idea of truth; and reflective nostalgia—a tendency to linger on the
ruins of the past and the imperfections of time.29 I will not provide an
exact roadmap to nostalgia in the Sisi Museum, but will attempt to point
out where different tendencies are at work. While the thematic empha-
sis on the body of the empress (via personal items such as her cocaine
needle, beauty aids, or her traveling medical kit) might reinforce a type
of restorative nostalgia (they remind us that she, too, was only human,
although the surface reflects near perfection), reflective nostalgia can
emerge when the visitor’s body comes into play (through sensorial
affect) in a manner that allows for critical thinking and distance. Here
the museum’s layout reveals cracks in the mirror of nostalgia, although
it does not shatter it completely. As Boym puts it, “[A] modern nostal-
gic can be homesick and sick of home, at once.”30 In sum, the nostalgia
that emerges in the Sisi Museum depends on the degree to which the
visitor is willing to go along with its narrative of national/social cohe-
sion and security as presented through the museum’s theatricality and
sensory-aesthetic approach.31 We as visitors decide where Sisi rests in
26 Hein, The Museum in Transition, 64 cites an example of the “stereotypical mid-

dle-aged white male visitor” who fails, unlike his female companion, to rec-
ognize the “jointed metal prong attached to a wooden handle” on display as a
curling iron.
30 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 50–1.
31 Chatting with Austrian friends reveals interesting insights; some are completely
baffled if not frustrated by the tourist fascination with and adoration of Sisi,
a reaction that aligns with what Hein discusses about authenticity and who
“owns” national histories. See her discussion of insider/outsider in the chapter
“Museums and Communities” in The Museum in Transition, 39.
60 Sissi’s World
the continuum of Austrian national identity; and within the context of

Habsburg history as reconstructed in Vienna, the Sisi Museum presents
multiple possibilities for identification and interpretation.
Presence: Theme, Layout, and Nostalgia’s Tendencies

All six thematic spaces of the Sisi Museum build in theatrical/cine-
matic elements, although some work more interactively than others.
Four encounters with the aspects of the empress’s/visitor’s body (hair,
sight/sound, language, and image) exemplify moments of the visitor’s
innervative engagement with nostalgia, examples that unfold as we
move chronologically through the space, revealing nostalgia’s different
tendencies as per Boym. As one of main mythic features of Sisi’s his-
tory, the visitor’s first encounter with hair begins before we even pass
through the museum’s main entrance.32 The relatively new addition
(since 2012) of the display case that houses three “real hair” wigs, fash-
ioned according to the styles of Sisi’s favorite hairdresser Fanny Freifa-
lik, stands directly across from the ticket counter. The location may clue
visitors in to the cost of beauty that they will encounter inside, or to the
dangers of becoming “a slave to one’s own hair,” a sentiment that Sisi
herself was said to have expressed.33 The choice of location is related
less to aesthetics or layout than to the late addition of the display,
but the wigs, housed next to where monetary transactions take place,
are thereby linked to issues of materiality and the fetish of hair. As a
reminder of the body, the knowledge that the wigs are made of “real
human hair” prompts questions about the unique circumstances of the
people from whose hair the wigs are constructed. Who were they? Did
their hair get selected or bought for this unusual purpose? Likewise,
one might reflect upon the artifacts of human hair in other museum
exhibits or histories, such as those whose hair was shorn forcefully, or
those who have donated or lost hair due to illness. For a short period of
time, the wigs reminded visitors (“female or male!”) of an opportunity
to engage with Sisi’s history more interactively, namely by participating
in the unique “Lifestyle-Event Sisi Hair Day” that was offered on Octo-
ber 17, 2014, where visitors gained free entrance into the special exhibit
“Seide—Spitze—Hermelin” if they showed up sporting a Sisi hairstyle
of their own creation.34
32 The shock of the entrance price can create a mini-death all its own, another rea-
son why so many reviews point out the three-in-one ticket including Silberkam-
mer, Sisi Museum, and State Apartments as the best value, at around US $40.
33 See Olivia Florek, “‘I Am a Slave To My Hair’: Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Fet-
ishism, and Nineteenth-Century Austrian Sexuality,” Modern Austrian Literature
42, no. 2 (2009): 1–15.
34 Hofburg Sisi Museum Website Press Information 2014.
Olivia Florek’s understanding of the multivalency of Sisi’s hair

reminds us that a change in hairstyle is a potential performance open
to anyone, and new interpretations become even more interesting
when social media is drawn into the mix.35 In Lichtscheidl’s efforts
to tell the story of Sisi with “the greatest possible authenticity” on
Sisi Hair Day, for example, she produced a YouTube tutorial featuring
makeup artist Hannelore Uhrmacher that instructs participants how
to create their own Sisi hairstyles. After their day at the museum, par-
ticipants were invited to pose for photographs that would be included
on the museum’s Facebook page, and a number of these commemora-
tive images are still “pinned” to it. The Sisi hair tutorial as produced
for the event is one of thousands of web tutorials that now populate
the web, covering any number of beauty topics, with a great num-
ber of these focusing on hair. The “Beauty Beacons” tutorial series,
for example, features styles of a number of famous historical women
from Cleopatra to Lucrezia Borgia and Brigitte Bardot, with Empress
Elisabeth’s tutorial claiming a respectable number of hits at 43,000.36
Indeed, the proliferation of hair care channels on the web offers even
greater transnational cultural empowerment for isolated women.
Filmmaker Karina Griffith sees the more recent phenomenon of web
hair tutorials as especially lifesaving for black women, for example,
in the possibility they hold for compiling and disseminating the col-
lective wisdom of hair care broadly, one example of which shares the
empress’s name: #HairTalksWithSisi from South Africa.37 The web
channel features a black South African woman named Sisi who offers
tips, tricks, and styles to do on all kinds of hair “from the comfort
35 Olivia Florek’s analysis of Winterhalter’s painting Die Kaiserin mit verschlun-

genem Haar, which shows the empress holding her hair across her body as if
a shawl, offers an alternative to the frequently discussed braid as a substitute
crown. As a source of empowerment and independence from the patriarchal
code, Florek reads Winterhalter’s portrait (the outcome of which Sisi apparently
weighed in on) as hiding the traditional aspects of female sexuality (neckline,
arms, waist) otherwise emphasized in portraiture of the time, and revealing her
as “self-sufficiently sexual” in the enjoyment of cradling her own hair. Florek,“‘I
Am a Slave To My Hair,’” 11.
36 Cleopatra has 13,326 hits; Lucrezia Borgia has 27,037 hits, and Brigit Bardot
97,724. “Beauty Beacons,” YouTube video, uploaded by Loepsie, November
5, 2016. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWpk-1VZu_
yPaJqyatS-aRwGjKhe6Vf-h (accessed November 3, 2017).
37 Griffith presented her findings at the 2016 Women in German conference in her
paper “Belonging and the Black Flaneuse in Two European Web Series,” Coali-
tion of Women in German (WiG) 41st Annual Conference, Banff, Alberta, Can-
ada, October 14, 2016.
62 Sissi’s World
of your own home.”38 Although for the present limited to a one-time

event, the Sisi Hair Day exemplifies a very clear example of Boym’s
reflective nostalgia, a distancing gesture that allows visitors to “make
meanings of their own.”39
The next encounter with bodily engagement, this time with the
more sensorial experiences of sight and sound, comes as we move
from the brightly lit space of the museum’s entrance into the dark-
ened first rooms of “Death,” a shift reflective of entering the theater.
Indeed, theatricality is immediately present in the shocking visual
encounter (“a bit odd,” as recalled by TripAdvisor’s Sue A) of Sisi’s
death mask that greets visitors at the entrance, a bright white face
against a purplish-black backdrop. The unusual chronology, i.e.
beginning an exploration of the empress’s life with the theme of
“Death,” introduces visitors to the museum’s perpetual and per-
plexing exercise in the push-and-pull of nostalgia, in which what we
expect always remains just out of reach. Beyond the death mask, else-
where in the space of “Death,” mirrors and special lighting highlight
various examples of extraordinary craftsmanship (befitting a royal),
focusing on an object’s beauty or uniqueness, such as the empress’s
mourning gowns, fans, gloves, and jewels (of black glass or jet/
polished lignite).40 The “Death” rooms thus enhance the visitor’s
sense of Boym’s restorative nostalgia, where the “truth” is reflected
in proximity to an authentic object (that she herself once touched);
just behind glass or mirrored into an echoing oblivion, it remains
so-close-but-yet-so-far-away.
The restorative aspect is also present in the museum’s audio guide
that visitors can initiate in “Death.” Like the dim lighting evocative
of the cinematic, a musical soundtrack (that ran from 2004 until 2007)
was also discernable in the distance, offering an eerie and ephem-
eral blend of not-quite-decipherable words whispered by a woman
(ostensibly based on one of Sisi’s poems), echoing against the sound
of waves crashing and seagulls crying (referencing her love of the
38 Sisi from South Africa mentions the “HBS Cambodian Curl,” “Peruvian Slicky,”
and “Indian Wave Hair.” Haircare has become an object of culture study as
reflected in Ayana Byrd and Lori L. Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of
Black Hair in America (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2014) and in the recent call
for an edited volume entitled Women’s Head Hair Issues by Sigal Barak-Brandes.
39 Hein, “Looking At Museums,” 55.
40 The empress wore only black from the 1889 suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf until
her death in 1898, and so the display “Death” that references her assassination
(on the Hofburg website) actually highlights the final years of the empress’s life
in the darkness of her beloved son’s absence. The museum displays her black
jewels, gowns, fans, and other personal items in reflection of that final mourning
period.
sea).41 Not unlike ambient music, known for having an atmospheric,

visual, and unobtrusive quality, the soundtrack added to an overall
sensory impression of repetition and lingering, even for the visitor
who initially resists (or is ambivalent to) the pull of nostalgia, as in the
example of visitor Szczurzynka, who claims: “I had no interest in Sisi
at all. They organized the exposition in such a clever way … I left …
thinking about her for the next 2 days.”
But the atmospheric music that no longer plays has a different (non-mu-
sical) soundtrack to replace it, one that might function even better to recall
the presence of the empress. In Stewart’s reflection on poetry and the
senses, she indicates that sound is connected to a higher order of intimacy,
beyond articulation. Citing Marcel Proust on hearing his grandmother’s
voice as separate from her body for the first time (on the telephone),
Stewart suggests that the voice can be seen as both the encounter with
death and the deferral of the encounter with death: “ … as the individual
voice contains within it the seed of its own disappearance, its fragility and
impermanence, so, in its fleetingness, does it bear a kind of aural imprint
on its history … ”42 Thus, the museum’s audio guide that uses the human
voice leaves a more profound aural marker on the visitor than the atmos-
pheric music or visual shocks alone: while a male narrator’s voice offers
“facts,” a woman’s voice speaks occasionally as the empress and relays
anecdotes in first-person narration, creating a sense of authenticity and,
by extension, a longing in the reminder of her actual absence.
In the next room labeled the “Sisi Myth,” visitors explore the mysti-
fication and mythification of the empress through the display of com-
memorative coins, stamps, statues, tourist memorabilia, as well as in
the projection of various film clips (for example from Ernst Marischka’s
“Sissi” trilogy). Interestingly, while the use of film in this space is the
most obvious instance of the cinematic in the museum, the fictive
narrative of the films serve at most to “convey the atmosphere of the
past”; they do little to present any kind of “historical argument” that
a documentary film could provide.43 Obviously, with no documentary
41 While it is not quite clear in which room the music began, the soundtrack
seemed to permeate the entire space, like an earworm. In the effort to keep
things interesting, it has since been removed. Additionally, an atmospheric film
that showed blurred images of a woman, water, birds, clouds, and so on on a
screen at the end of the exhibit has also since been removed. The museum’s
audio or guided tours are still available (and repeatedly referred to positively in
the reviews).
42 Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 108.
43 Stephen Jaeger, “Historical Museum meets Docu-Drama: The Recipient’s Expe-
riential Involvement in the Second World War,” in Exhibiting the German Past, ed.
Peter M. MacIsaac and Gabriele Mueller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2015), 138.
64 Sissi’s World
available, the fictive (campy) nature of the Sissi films works to both pro-
duce and interrupt nostalgia, although the latter experience wins out.
Given the disruptive juxtaposition of Romy Schneider (as Marischka’s
Sissi) in the midst of other commercialized fabrications of the empress’s
life, the project of nostalgia here becomes irritating, specifically due to
the awkward spatial configuration, lack of air-conditioning, and over-
lap of the museum’s various soundtracks.
As relayed in TripAdvisor reviews, the museum at this point reflects
a cacophonic experience: “sensory overload,” “unexpectingly touch-
ing,” “overwhelming audio,” “need stamina,” “a different flavor,”
and “slightly overcome with the nauseous opulence.”44 A number of
reviews reflect visitors’ physical unease in the space, often pointing to
the challenges of navigating in the dim lighting (which does function-
ally serve to protect fragile textiles from heat and light), but more fre-
quently to the small, serpentine corridors that induce any number of
different responses, from “maze-y”45 and “winding” to “clever … there
is no way you can remain indifferent to what you are seeing,”46 and
“tortuous.” One visitor was happy to have found a door in the State
Apartments “that allowed us a quick exit.”47 Near the “Sisi Myth’s”
exit, where visitors are invited to sit on a very limited number of theat-
er-style seats to watch the film clips, the audio guide competes for
attention. Thus, what little romantic reverie that might emerge in the
screening of Marischka’s films is squelched, if not by the need to stand,
then by the audio guide’s interruption.
The third encounter with innervation becomes evident when mov-
ing on to the rooms of “Girlhood,” “At Court,” and “Flight,” where the
aural “quotation” of the empress as a voice of authenticity calls to mind
Stewart’s discussion of how written language functions in history’s sto-
rytelling. According to Stewart, the very act of interjecting a quotation
to authenticate historical value introduces uncertainty:
In detaching the utterance from its context of origin, the …

quotation appears as a severed head, a voice whose authority is
grounded in itself, and therein lies its power and its limit. For
although it speaks with the voice of history and tradition … it has
44 Authors of TripAdvisor reviews from 2015 refer to their experience in the fol-
lowing terms: “sensory overload” (ButterflyGalFlorida); and from 2016 “unex-
pectingly touching” (AlanWCape), “overwhelming audio” (Andrea G.), “need
stamina” (morag560), “overdose” (Deep M), “a different flavor” (Jayi R), and
“slightly overcome with the nauseous opulence” (Nick W).
45 Paula L., TripAdvisor, 2015.
46 Szczurzynka, TripAdvisor, 2016.
47 Sue A., TripAdvisor, 2016.
been severed from its context of origin … that gave it authenticity.

Once quoted, the utterance enters the arena of social conflict.48
With this uncertainty in mind then, we might ask what function the
curated placards of Sisi quotations and poems that hang in three differ-
ent textual variations serve in the museum.49 One placard presents Sisi
in a confessional mode in 1854: “O! had I but never left the path/that
would have led me to freedom/O that on the broad avenues/of vanity
I had never strayed!” The poetic nature of the text allows for imagina-
tion (play) to come to the fore, particularly in the word vanity as an
expression of a human weakness that is universally shared. But severed
from its origin, the quotation also enters into a space open to negotia-
tion with the present, where readers may not identify. Do “the path,”
“freedom,” and “broad avenues” necessarily relate to “vanity”? This
conflict is reflected in what Stewart sees as “the two primary functions
of language—to make present what can only be experienced abstractly,
and to textualize our experience and thereby make it available for inter-
pretation and closure.”50
What pushes the quotation into the realm of identity for the visitor
are perhaps the material accoutrements of vanity on display next to it,
namely the gloves, fan, and umbrella that were common to any wealthy
woman in the late nineteenth century. Viewed within the context of the
empress’s lamentation of the “path” that did not lead to “freedom” or
“broad avenues,” the objects of vanity take on a new meaning, namely
that of allowing for escape or disguise. We know that Sisi attempted to
circumvent imperial control of her movements whenever possible by
traveling incognito. As well, she took extreme measures to control her
self-image in the public sphere, refusing to be photographed, according to
Brigitte Hamann, after the age of 35. Thus, while the quotation selected by
Lichtscheidl and Wohlfahrt serves as a reminder of Sisi’s particular expe-
rience of vanity as empress (which we can experience only abstractly),
its textualization on the placards allows it, like the material objects on
display next to it, to see her vanity in a concrete, more tangible form.
48 Stewart, On Longing, 19. Stewart’s “severed head” recalls the fragmentary

nature of history, not only reminding one of Sefaris’ marble head in the opening
poem but also of Sisi’s death mask. The severed head motive stems from Walter
Benjamin’s introduction “Antoine Weirtz: Thoughts and Visions of a Severed
Head” (1853) that is followed by the Weirtz caption to his triptych of the same
name. See Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Repro-
ducibility, and Writings on Media, ed. Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty,
and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
49 The three types are: a facsimile of her own cursive, a block-printed German, and
a block-printed English.
50 Stewart, On Longing, 19.
66 Sissi’s World
The visitor can interpret vanity thus as a reciprocal vice, a two-way expe-
rience that involves both spectacle and spectator. In the context of the
empress’s voice, the objects more readily reveal their function as shields
from the ogling masses, prompting reflection of our own complicity in
(the construction of) history. After all, it is not enough to acknowledge
our own vanity; better still is to recognize the “social conflict” of our own
roles as ogling spectators in the museum (and more broadly, as consum-
ers of paparazzi photographs and stories of famous people).51
A final example of innervation comes to light through a slightly
uncanny, unexpected, and unintentional visual effect in the “At Court”
and “Flight” spaces. As stated, the ability to walk physically through
the Sisi museum offers “sensuous, somatic, and tactile forms of percep-
tion” that recall Benjamin’s experience of the cinema, bringing contem-
plation and distraction together at once, very unlike the bright, orderly
rooms of the State Apartments that follow (there visitors are asked to
remain on the straight and narrow corridor that flows from one room
to the next).52 The tactile knowledge of other visitors’ bodies in the “At
Court” and “Flight” rooms creates an at times uncomfortable proxim-
ity, confounded again by the lack of air-conditioning. Often standing
inches away from objects in the dimly lit rooms, the glass cases allow
for close examination, but the cases hold a further, unexpected image
as well: that of the viewer herself. The combination of the lighting and
black painted walls creates a mirror-like reflection in the display, with
visitors’ bodies and faces projected back at them, disrupting their gaze
at objects. Alice’s experience in Through the Looking Glass immediately
comes to mind, where visitors see the topsy-turvy world of royal excess
within their meandering, “entranced by the story and environment”53
and staring in “trance-like state, gawping in wonder at the sheer opu-
lence of it all.”54 In the cases that display Sisi’s dresses, visitors have a
full-body, 360-degree view. Here the spectacle is interrupted not only by
one’s own reflection, but also by the tourist standing on the other side,
through the glass case. Already uncomfortable in viewing one’s own
slightly distorted mirrored image, looking through the glass cases is all
the more awkward if viewers happen to catch each other’s eye, recog-
nizing that they have been “caught looking.” But a sense of playfulness
and encounter can also emerge, in questioning “do you see what I see?”
In the same vein, the possibility also exists that the tourist is left alone
looking into the glass, his/her solitude reflecting that of the subject.
51 For more on this point, see Taylor’s chapter “False Identifications,” in The Archive
and the Repertoire.
52 Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema,” 314.
53 tr2dis, TripAdvisor, 2016.
54 LoughboroughJim 2017, TripAdvisor, 2017.
Abstraction: Stepping Back to Consider Scale

The interactive engagement with the body via the museum’s theatrical-
ity, storytelling, and layout offers one way of understanding how visi-
tors can identify with Sisi’s story. But, to consider how the Sisi Museum
positions the empress within the broader context of Austrian and
Habsburg history, Susan Stewart’s reflections on scale are useful; in par-
ticular, Stewart’s focus on the body inspired my focus on corporeality
in this essay. Her semiotic study On Longing explores the relationship
between narratives and language to objects and is anchored in an explo-
ration of metaphors of the miniature, the gigantic, and the souvenir as
ways to unpack what she calls “the social disease of nostalgia.”55 The
metaphors of the miniature (in the examples of the book, dollhouse, toy,
tableau) and the gigantic (the abstract authority of the state, public life)
serve in interconnected ways to ultimately reflect narratives of interior-
ity (the bourgeois interior, the self), where nostalgia’s familiar struggle
is present in the attempt to reconcile “inside and outside, visible and
invisible, transcendence and partiality of perspective,”56 the tensions
of which, as discussed in feminist spatial theory, are also instructive.
Stewart’s reflections on the souvenir as an object generated by narrative
that “contracts the world in order to expand the personal”57 is apropos
in the case of Sisi, where on every street, in subway kiosks or airport
gift shops, Sisi souvenirs dominate the shelves, reflecting “omnipresent
references to Sisi throughout Vienna,” as observed by TripAdvisor’s
Robin R.
In terms of scale, it is helpful to consider briefly the Sisi Museum
(and the cult of Sisi) within the broader context of Habsburg history in
comparison to the representations of Empress Maria Theresa at Schön-
brunn Palace, an assessment that can highlight the potentially feminist
aims of the Sisi Museum. Building on Erving Goffmann’s sociologi-
cal classic Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, art historian Michael
Yonan offers a detailed exploration of objects, buildings, and gardens
as a reflection of Maria Theresa’s reign and the supposed impenetra-
bility of Habsburg power.58 The greatness of the empress’s forty-year
reign as monarch (1740–1780) is reflected through various manifes-
tations of her physical and symbolic/material corpulence, from the
sixteen children she bore to the paintings that depict her impressive
girth and from the expansive structure of Schönbrunn Palace to the
55 Stewart, On Longing, ix.

56 Stewart, On Longing, xii.
57 Stewart, On Longing, xii.
58 Erving Goffmann, Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor
Books, 1959); Michael Elia Yonan, Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg
Imperial Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).
68 Sissi’s World
44-ton, 19-meter-high monumental Maria Theresa Memorial (created

in 1888 by Kaspar Zumbush) that towers over the art and natural his-
tory museums at the Maria-Theresien-Platz. Like Yonan’s study, the
Sisi Museum also provides reflection on the empress’s body, but from
a phenomenological angle; considering curatorial choice, museum
configuration, and visitor experience, slightly different information
becomes available. Clearly, not only in regard to her personal and pub-
lic history does Sisi stand symbolically in opposition to representations
of Maria Theresa. Examples of this contrast range from her outsider
status as a German princess within the Habsburg monarchy to the
attempts to minimize her presence at court through travel, or from
the dietary regimen that kept her impossibly thin to her open rejection
of courtly protocol during her lifetime (that made her into a cham-
pion of rebellion for some), or, finally, to the 2.5-meter-high Empress
Elisabeth monument tucked away in a corner of the Volksgarten that
befits her minority role as mere wife to the emperor Franz Joseph. Rep-
resentations of Sisi differ from those of Maria Theresa also in the way
in which the Sisi Museum tells her story and involves the visitor in
that history, how both the body of the empress is presented and how
tourists respond to it; all of these mechanisms allow for cracks in the
patina of history to appear, ultimately interrupting the nostalgia of a
seemingly endless Habsburg reign.
Stewart’s metaphors of scale are useful when considering the
Sisi Museum’s placement within the Hofburg palace itself, i.e. the
empress’s former residence, a space in which biographer Hamann
claims she never truly felt at home. A connection thus exists between
the empress’s discomfort in the palace during her lifetime and the
museum visitor’s discomfort in the present configuration of the
palace. As a smaller section of the larger palace, the Sisi Museum
(housed in the former apartments of archduke Stephan Victor)
reflects Stewart’s discussion of the miniature as a metaphor of con-
tainment. Using the dollhouse as the consummate example, Stewart
explains:
the house within a house, the dollhouse not only presents the
house’s articulation of the tension between inner and outer
spheres, of exteriority and interiority—it also represents the
tension between two modes of interiority. Occupying a space
within an enclosed space, the dollhouses’ aptest analogy is the
locket or the secret recesses of the heart: center within center,
within within within.59

While the Sisi Museum is certainly not of the scale or perspective of the
dollhouse, the metaphor offers some parallels, such as its occupation of
an enclosed space within the more expansive, gigantic representational
spaces of the Hofburg, reflecting the “within within within.” In the
awkwardness reflected in psychological/ethical considerations in the
reviews, Stewart’s “two modes of interiority” come to mind. An unset-
tling discomfort emerges in visitor reviews upon learning the “truth”
of the empress’s desire to remain hidden from the public eye during
her lifetime: as if privy to what Stewart calls the “recesses of the heart,”
one reviewer notes that “[i]t is as if one trespassed into the most private
aspects of a very private person. Unsettling in a way.”60 Another states,
“She was also an extremely private person who wanted to be left alone.
I felt that this Museum would be the last thing the Empress Elisabeth
would want.”61 Thus, the irony of Sisi’s final “containment” within the
one residential space and city that she most disliked can disrupt the
nostalgic fantasy of the empress in her palace.
In feminist critiques of the museum, where the grandeur of museum
architecture expresses “certainty and stability” via “patrician and patri-
archal authority,”62 the interiority of the Sisi Museum within the Hof-
burg is not unlike the dollhouse that, “as we know from the political
economy as well as from Ibsen,” is a place in which subjects experience
both “sanctuary (fantasy) and prison (the boundaries or limits of other-
ness, the inaccessibility of what cannot be lived experience).”63 This ten-
sion is mirrored in feminist spatial theorists Patricia Hill Collins’s and
Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s discussion of home as a site of paradoxical
geography. Understanding subjectivity as it inhabits paradoxical posi-
tions—of both prisoner and exile, of center and margin, of being on the
inside and the outside at the same time—the function of the Hofburg
(as home/palace/museum) can be understood as a site of oppression,
where tight rooms and dark lighting can be unsettling.64 At the same
time, however, the disruption also serves to balance what can become
an otherwise overwhelming flow of nostalgia.
In its reciprocal relationship to the miniature, Stewart’s analysis of
the gigantic further unpacks nostalgia’s project, for whereas “the min-
iature makes the body gigantic, the gigantic transforms the body into
miniature, pointing to the body’s ‘toylike’ and ‘insignificant’ aspects.”65
To illustrate this point, she draws a parallel to several historical “giants”
60 161nicola, TripAdvisor, 2016.

61 Laurie D., Yelp, 2014.
62 Hein, “Looking at Museums,” 55.
64 See Michael J. Dear and Steven Flusty, eds., The Spaces of Postmodernity: Readings
in Human Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
70 Sissi’s World
(Socrates, Frankenstein, King Kong) who are made diminutive in their

experience of “profound aloneness,” left as voyeuristic outsiders look-
ing in.66 The body of the empress can be envisioned in a similar vein.
With the exaggerated representations of her physical features, both
fictional and non-fictional (her floor-length hair, miniscule waistline,
and legendary beauty), in addition to the tales of her extraordinary
equestrian skills and extended hiking, railroad, and seafaring excur-
sions (emphasized especially in the rooms “At Court” and “Flight”),
Sisi becomes a kind of mythic, distorted giant herself. Like other histor-
ical giants (akin to those of the carnival grotesque described by Stew-
art), biographies and novels about the empress refer to her as “lonely,”67
“reluctant,”68 “accidental” or “on her own,”69 a perpetual outsider to the
royal circles that she was meant to inhabit. In the context of Habsburg
history, the empress’s mythic proportions remind us of Alice’s body
protruding from the rabbit’s house in Wonderland, for as the popularity
of the Sisi Museum reveals, the myth of Sisi has indeed become larger
than all other stories of the House of Habsburg combined. After all, no
other member of the Habsburg monarchy, including Maria Theresa, has
an entire museum dedicated solely to him/herself.
Absence: The Case of the Missing Corset, Ghosting, and

Post-Museum Nostalgia
That which the museum presents is sometimes not as interesting as that
which is absent, and the following section explores three different types
of absences and how they function to prolong nostalgia’s project. In
the first example, the evidence of one of Sisi’s corsets could serve to
significantly authenticate the empress’s legendary waistline, and yet,
no such artifact is included in the exhibit. The mystery of its absence
functions as a type of stand-in for what Elisabeth Bronfen has called the
cultural necessity of the beautiful woman as dead. The second example
considers life-sized photographic apparitions of Sisi that linger beyond
the museum’s space as devices to promote the ideas of “postmem-
ory”70 and “ghosting.”71 Since these terms offer a means to creatively
interpret the past, the apparitions invite viewers to instances of further
interactive engagement. The final example considers how the activities

67 See Joan Haslip, The Lonely Empress: Elisabeth of Austria (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicholson, 1965).
68 See Brigitte Hamann, The Reluctant Empress (Berlin: Ullstein, 2000).
69 See Allison Pataki, The Accidental Empress (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015).
70 See Aleida Assmann’s discussion of Marianne Hirsch in “Ghosts of the Past,”
Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture 17, no. 34 (2007): 5–19.
71 See Taylor’s chapter “False Identifications,” in The Archive.
of writing social media reviews and collecting souvenirs might fill the
void of nostalgia once the museum visit ends.
In the case of what the Sisi Museum has failed to uncover, the case of
the missing corset stands out prominently. As the fundamental regulator
of female sexuality, the corset—the stay of my title—is the first intimate
item that comes to mind when one considers the nineteenth-century
female body, and is frequently the mainstay of any historical exhibit
that focuses on women.72 Beyond its quotidian function, the garment
carries even further significant cultural value in the case of Sisi: not only
does it merge with the empress’s body in its definition of her most sali-
ent body feature; it also became fused to the body’s sensory capacity
during the moment of her death. It was her corset, after all, laced so
tightly on the day of her stabbing, which protected her from the knowl-
edge of her own passing for several minutes. Considering the meaning
of Sisi’s corset via Bronfen’s psychoanalytic approach to our fascination
with women’s death, the absence of the corset as a reminder of her body
becomes a necessary function in restorative nostalgia’s “truth”:
[T]he death of a beautiful woman emerges as a requirement for

a preservation of existing cultural norms and values … Over her
dead body, cultural norms are reconfigured or secured, whether
because the sacrifice of the virtuous, innocent woman serves a
social critique and transformation or because a sacrifice of the
dangerous woman reestablishes an order that was momentarily
suspended due to her presence.73
Thus, from the theme of death at the museum’s entrance to the theme of
assassination at its end and beyond it—the repetition and reinforcement
of the themes of absence and loss become an unsurprising aspect in the
narration of Sisi’s life. Indeed, so common is the trope of the beautiful
dead female body that narratives of different women eventually bleed
into one another, as in the cases of Lady Diana and Sisi (one visitor
writes that “Empress Elisabeth of Austria’s Sisi is the original Princess
Di”)74 or become central to the “sacralizing” nature of the museum,75
as in one review that refers to the Sisi museum as “almost a shrine.”76
72 My italics; see Karin Schrott’s, Das normative Korsett: Reglementierungen für

Frauen in Gesellschaft und Öffentlichkeit in der deutschsprachigen Anstands- und
Benimmliteratur zwischen 1871–1914 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
2005).
73 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 181.
74 Margaret B., TripAdvisor, 2016.
75 Taylor, The Archive, 154.
76 AlanWCape, TripAdvisor, 2016.
72 Sissi’s World
The fact that “we’ve seen it all before” is what allows the nostalgia
to appear repeatedly, like a familiar friend.77 In fact, my inquiry into the
lack of the presence of a corset in either the display or the archived col-
lection was met with a relative nonchalance, despite written evidence
that confirms that Sisi did indeed wear a corset (no less than seven
were included in her wedding trousseau).78 (Research) Team Hofburg
confirmed that no corset has ever been displayed, because none has
ever been located: “There are in fact no corsets of the Empress Elis-
abeth on display in the museum. Unfortunately, to our knowledge at
this point, no such piece of clothing has yet emerged.”79 For the visitor,
Sisi’s gowns seem to suffice as evidence of her mythic waistline, for
although some visitors look for evidence to prove rumors of “that ridic-
ulous tiny waist,”80 others claim, “you can’t imagine … but you’ll get an
idea [of] when you see the gowns on display.”81 As a representational
artifact of the empress and her femininity, the gowns act as a type of
buffer to blur the grotesque truth of the empress’s “tiny” circumference.
More so, however, in the absence of the closer referent of the corset (as
body/Woman/nature), the gowns protect the visitor from being caught
“looking” too closely and from their fascination with and insistence on
Woman’s death.
However, the missing corset still leaves open the question as to why
none remains; for example, what roles might negligence, modesty,
decay, or destruction play? Ultimately though, the gap in the historical
archive left by the corset’s absence is more successful than the object
itself in producing nostalgia, a truth reflected in the fact that wide-
spread fascination and veneration for Sisi only came about after her
death. Given the nostalgic’s need for absence, it is perhaps not so unu-
sual that the desire to actually see the material evidence of the corset is
entirely overlooked (its missing status is not a concern shared in social
media, for example). As a form-fitting centerpiece to the empress’s life
and death, where the corset stands in as trace of the empress’s corpore-
ality itself, its missing status goes unnoticed.
While the corset’s absence contributes to the mythic (sacred) propor-
tions of Sisi’s story in symbolically reifying the necessity of the beau-
tiful woman’s death/absence, another specter of history carries forth

78 See Walter Hain and Renate Hain, Die Kaiserin Elisabeth und die historische
Wahrheit (n.p.: Books on Demand, 2015).
79 The following information was relayed in a Facebook correspondence,
November, 2016: “Im Museum sind tatsächlich keine Korsette der Kaiserin
Elisabeth ausgestellt. Unseres Wissens sind bis jetzt leider keine derartigen Klei-
dungsstücke aufgetaucht …!”
80 Danielle K., TripAdvisor, 2016.
81 Margaret B., TripAdvisor, 2016.
the fantasy of absence in an uncanny and somewhat playful way. In

spaces beyond the museum’s six thematic rooms, ghost-like appari-
tions of Sisi appear in the form of life-sized cardboard cut-outs upon
which enlarged photographs of the empress are affixed. Set up in hall-
ways and stairwells that are otherwise roped off to tourist foot traffic,
those “non-spaces” through which people simply pass, the apparitions
offer thus an unexpected glimpse of the empress, eerily ghost-like.82
Presenting the vision of Sisi as life-sized photographs, the figures pro-
vide a documentary function, as “accurate evidence of an otherwise
inaccessible past,” as well as (and more importantly) a memorial func-
tion,83 where they become “missing links” to history.84 Whereas Hirsch’s
discussion of photographs as a function of “postmemory” serves to
connect family members across generations (a closeness in relationship
that could apply to the cult of Sisi fans), Assmann sees postmemory’s
strength not as a tool for mediating “recollection” but as “an imagina-
tive investment and creation.”85 This creative play with memory is also
reflected in Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire, where the mourning
of a past icon (i.e. Lady Di) becomes a performance that she refers to
as “ghosting.”86 According to Taylor, performance “constitutes a (qua-
si-magical) invocational practice. It provokes emotions it claims only to
represent, evokes memories and grief that belong to some other body.
It conjures up and makes visible not just the life but the powerful army
of the always already living.”87 The momentary performance of Sisi as
photographic apparition allows for an interesting combination of the
concepts of postmemory and ghosting via the possibility of visitors’
creative interpretations. The image both lingers and is carried forward
in an interactive, subjective manner.
82 On non-spaces, see Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity,

trans. by John Howe (London: Verso, 1995). Aleida Assmann explains the differ-
ence between ghosts (as an intrusion) and spirits (as conjured up) in “Ghosts,”
particularly in relation to the trauma of memory. While Sisi’s traumatic history
differs from the stories of Holocaust victims that Assmann discusses, it serves as
a reminder that she was violently murdered. Her assassination reflects the wave
of anti-monarchical sentiment that led to the 1914 murder of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the 1918 deaths of the Tsar Nicholas II and his family.
Assmann discusses the role of photography and memory, especially at times
when “there is a sudden and alarming rise in the numbers of dead … where the
bereft … try to establish some form of contact across the borderline between the
world of the living and the dead.” “Ghosts,” 6–7.
83 Assmann, “Ghosts,” 11–12.
84 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22.
85 Assmann, “Ghosts,” 12.
86 Taylor, The Archive, 142–3.
74 Sissi’s World
Of course the apparition reminds again of the fleeting excitement of

recognition: after passing through the Sisi’s Museum’s many rooms in
close study of her life, we run into her, life-sized, and can only exclaim
“there she is!” if not still slightly sheepishly, as if caught in the act. In
drawing nearer to the cutouts, we are invited to peer directly into her
eyes as evidence of the past, but are somehow reassured in her card-
board flatness that she is not there, the beautiful-dead-woman narra-
tive restored. What is uncanny, however, is the placement of some of
the apparitions in the non-spaces of hallways and stairwells, spaces in
which we are not meant to linger, but can only pass through; roped
off from pedestrian traffic, we are reminded that Sisi inhabits a space
into which we may only peer, but can never enter. Thus, spatially and
temporally separated, Sisi remains unattainable, a specter of the past
to which we do not belong, even as she stands as missing link before
us. We must move on. But even more uncanny is the one cut-out that
shows Sisi’s back turned to us. She is clearly headed out the door of the
museum, making her way out of the Hofburg. It is she who is sneaking
down the hall and out the door, ready for a fast getaway. This is the
glimpse of the past of which we must ask ourselves: who got away? It
is indeed not the visitor, entangled as we are in our own nostalgia for
what was, but rather Sisi, who was really much better at exiting the
building than we are.
As much as the mythic proportions of Sisi are securely contained
within the museum’s walls, then, where the empress’s seemingly “toy-
like and insignificant” aspects reflect her ostensible eccentricity (for
example, her traveling milk glass or unusual beauty/fitness regimen),
the myth of Sisi is, indeed, capable of escape/escaping. This depends
on the visitor’s willingness to allow for that escape. Sisi’s mythic pro-
portions extend beyond the museum’s wall, for example, through the
souvenir shop, where the innumerable commemorative items available
for purchase throughout the city echo and distort her image as a giant,
albeit in consumable, portable, and “toylike” proportions. As a tourist
destination Vienna succeeds in its goal of resisting any sense of ruin in
the classical sense—no crumbling pillars, no dilapidated structures or
ruinous landscapes are present; the Hofburg’s beautifully intact archi-
tecture stands timelessly in the center, and the Sisi Museum continues
to fulfill its purpose of drawing visitors in to an encounter with the
(inevitably impossible) “authentic.” Like the commemorative photo
offered to participants of the “Sisi Hair Day,” the museum’s gift shop
can work to satisfy the “insatiable demands of nostalgia” through the
purchase of a souvenir.88 The practice of collecting souvenirs reminds

one of Benjamin’s reflections on historical materialism and the sense

that, in the end, it is the masses who understand the illusion of human
history best. This illusion is nowhere better represented than in the
excessive marketing of Sisi’s image on plates, cups, fans, thimbles,
coasters, spoons, and bells that reinforce a domesticity that misrepre-
sents the empress entirely, for her perpetual escape and travel define
her as anything but domestic.
Visitor reviews in social media reflect the occasional recognition of
this irony. In the same way that Sisi’s mythic proportions are reflected
in the souvenir shop, the exaggerated scale of her popularity can be
measured in the practice of writing reviews, like those on the Sisi muse-
um’s Facebook page with its almost 16,000 followers (of roughly 50,000
views), or in TripAdvisor’s over 2,000 reviews. While the use of social
media merits its own analysis (especially given the ample connections
that can be made to Stewart’s chapter “On Description and the Book”
in On Longing, or to Benjamin’s reflections on the practices of collecting,
storytelling, or photography), I consider them only briefly here because
of the ways in which their repetitive nature circles back to nostalgia’s
search for the familiar.89
One might consider web reviews as a way to bring the past into the
present and the personal into the collective, just as the poet Sefaris sug-
gested long ago his concern that the dream of history and its reality
“become one … difficult … to separate again.” While the Facebook-fo-
cused masses seek to experience and prove authenticity continuously,
most obviously through the production and publication of selfies in
front of historical sights, online reviewers of the Sisi museum frequently
lament the museum’s “no photography” policy. Thus, with photo-
graphic proof denied, the next best thing is reflected in the production
89 Indeed, touching here on souvenirs and social/cultural/visual media merely

skims the surface of an expansive and ever-increasing field of exploration that
includes cultural, communication, and media studies, sociology, anthropology,
and art history. See Susan M. Pearce, Interpreting Objects and Collections (Abing-
don, UK: Routledge, 1994) and On Collecting (New York: Routledge, 1995);
Susan Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early-Nineteenth Century
Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). On social media to eval-
uate film, see Andrew McWhirter, Film Criticism and Digital Cultures: Journal-
ism, Social Media and the Democratization of Opinion (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016);
for social media and museums, see Linda Lotina and Krista Lepik, “Exploring
Engagement Repertoires in Social Media: the Museum Perspective,” Journal of
Ethnology and Folklorists 9, no. 1 (2015): 123–42. Another area of exploration is
social media’s role in education, such as a study about Facebook in connection
to language learning: Željka Babić, Tatjana Bijelić, and Petar Penda, Rethinking
Tradition in English Language and Literary Studies (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2017).
76 Sissi’s World
of social media reviews, leaving these narratives as the only “mean-

ing making” available, like sending a text-only postcard. According to
Stewart, this narrative is really all we need:
We do not need or desire souvenirs of events that are repeatable.

Rather we need and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable,
events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby
exist only through the invention of narrative. Through narrative
the souvenir substitutes a context of perpetual consumption for
its context of origin. It represents not the lived experience of its
maker but the ‘secondhand’ experience of its possessor/owner.90
For like the collector of souvenirs whose ultimate goal is to have the
collection “stand for the world,” the digital proof of one’s experiences
is akin to collecting souvenir objects of the places one has visited.91 Like
the categorizing, labeling, and cataloging that the collector pursues,
web reviewers’ comments are also cataloged and organized. TripAd-
visor, for example, virtually rewards reviewers by grading frequent
reviewers with different contributor levels, the reviewer’s reputation
and reliability seeming to increase each time she contributes another
review. The same function applies to the number of friends one has on
Facebook.92
There is an impressive amount of dedication as well as ego that goes
into the faithful production of regular reviews, especially when tour-
ist-reviewers actively contribute their reflections on a large number of
tourist locations.93 While reviews vary in length and depth, many seem
to take on a repetitive pattern, such as the blind tendency to repeat sim-
ilar words of amazement like “interesting,” “beautiful,” and “tragic,”
words that appear as if by a group of believers reciting a prayer or reli-
gious incantation. While their repetition renders them questionable as
sources of information, they can be said to act as a type of correction
or soothing mechanism to the sensory overload of the museum. Their
repetition calls forth a comforting mimetic quality; as Benjamin writes,
“the coherence of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like
a flash, similarity appears.”94

92 Since September 30, 2016 the Sisi Museum Facebook page boasts 14,000 fans.
93 TripAdvisor’s 545medva from Budapest, Hungary, for example, has 2,361
reviews. Hofburg Wien: Kaiserappartements, Sisi Museum, Silberkammer,
Facebook page. Available at: www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=Hofburg%20
Wien%3A%20Kaiserappartements%20%7C%20Sisi%20Museum%20%7C%20
Silberkammer (accessed October 23, 2016).
94 Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” 335.
Beyond the oddity of their repetitive nature, I am struck by the lack

of reference to objects and experiences in the reviews that, given their
historical significance (the corset) or embarrassing frequency (mirror-
ing effect) one might expect. Perhaps it is too awkward to share one’s
self-reflection in the glass display publicly, for example; after all, many
social media reviews seem to enjoy expressing a newfound Sisi exper-
tise rather than any vulnerability. However, because many of the glass
cases that allow for this kind self-reflexivity are those that house the
dresses—probably the most frequently mentioned artifacts in online
reviews, the mirroring I describe is surely experienced by many visi-
tors, but it is not acknowledged. After all, visitors are not supposed to
see themselves reflected. In the distorted, playful, or uncanny reflection
that visitors glimpse superimposed onto the empress’s “toylike” dress
size in the glass, an awareness of both presence/life and absence/death
are awakened, the ambivalence in the knowledge of self/Other con-
firmed. But this acknowledgment is not one that is sought after: rather
than be reminded of the fragility of one’s own body, it is much more
appealing to focus on the gowns, in particular their potential status as
sacred objects, in which the viewer remains invisible (as anonymous
paying customer).
Conclusion
What makes the Sisi Museum a memorable experience is maintained
in the interactive experience it offers to promote or disrupt the restor-
ative and/or reflective tendencies of nostalgia. The first section of this
chapter explored various examples of mimetic innervation that help
visitors piece together the fragments of the empress’s tragic life. Physi-
cal reminders of and sensory encounters (hair/sight/sound/language)
with the body (of the empress and of the visitor her/himself) become
part of the ephemeral nature of the tourist experience; as aspects of our
nostalgic repertoire, these innervative encounters get stored away as one
of many kinds of personal recollections. As Stewart points out, “for the
nostalgic to reach his or her goal of closing the gap between resemblance
and identity, lived experience would have to take place.”95 Such lived
experiences are what the museum offers in its emphasis on corporeality.
In the second section, the search for authenticity and the realiza-
tion of its loss continues in the process of nostalgic reflection beyond
the exhibit itself, particularly when they are measured against meta-
phors of the miniature and the gigantic. Stewart’s reflections of scale
offer a playfully comparative opportunity, specifically between the
greatness that Maria Theresa represents in her political, biological, and
95 Stewart, On Longing, 145. Italics in original.

78 Sissi’s World
representational corpulence within Austrian and Habsburg history as

compared to Sisi’s relative insignificance in all of these areas. In playing
with metaphors of the miniature and the gigantic, Stewart encourages
an exploration of the narratives and objects of history from a differ-
ent perspective, where what was once considered as diminutive and
unimportant becomes exaggerated and hard to ignore. In addition, the
shake-up that metaphors of scale provide reflect concerns that have
been expressed by feminist spatial theorists and museum studies schol-
ars in the past, offering a perspective that highlights feminist elements
within the Sisi Museum itself.
The final section asks what happens in the realm of absence, when
an expected relic does not turn up, or within the liminal spaces in
between the exhibition rooms, or once we leave the Hofburg altogether
and our visit is over. Missing artifacts and ghost-like images of the
empress’s effigy that invite a sense of authentic encounter figure into
the Sisi Museum’s strategies for recollecting and constructing nostal-
gia, although these are not necessarily a source of great discussion on
social media reviews. The collection of souvenirs found in the shops
that blanket the city provide the opportunity to relive nostalgically not
only the empress’s past, but also the entire museum visit and vacation
experience itself. As the full expression of nostalgia dictates, the private
and the public merge.
In sum, a visit to the Sisi Museum offers an almost outdated expe-
rience through its visceral reminder of physical sensations of warm,
awkward, and oddly configured spaces in semi-darkness that evoke
childhood experiences akin to those of the carnival or the freak-show.
These stand in sharp contrast to the increasingly climate-controlled,
professionalized, ascetic atmosphere that prevails in many museums.
The Sisi Museum’s playfulness and experimentation with various
types of programming and cinematic/theatrical features would be well
served by a virtual reality tour, where tourists of the future need not
even travel to Vienna. For the time being, however, the intermediary
space that the museum provides still recognizes the centrality of the
body—both that of its primary historical subject and that of the tour-
ist—as key elements in the continual production of nostalgia.
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Sisi Redux: The Empress
Four
Elisabeth and Her Cult
in Post-Communist Hungary
Judith Szapor and András Lénárt
Introduction
The Sisi experience begins right on the suburban railway, the economy
option of getting to the Gödöllő Royal Palace, thirty kilometers to the
northeast of Budapest. Restored and re-opened as a museum in 1996,
the Palace has been devoted to maintaining the legacy of Elisabeth,
Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary, popularly known as Sisi. Half-
way there, at Cinkota station, a billboard of an enterprising used-car
business named Sziszi (sic!) sets the tone. A prominent caption on the
Museum’s web page: “Sisi’s favourite Hungarian Palace” and a larger-
than-life picture of the Empress in her famous Hungarian-style coro-
nation dress dwarf the pristinely restored Baroque edifice of the castle
itself, relegated to the background.1 The Museum positions itself on the
international Sisi-circuit; it is the easternmost stop on the “Sisi-Road,”
stringing together the sites of Elisabeth’s life from her Bavarian birth-
place to Lake Geneva, the scene of her 1898 assassination.2 Judging by
the travelers on the mid-morning train—a Japanese couple, a group of
middle-aged Austrian women, and a British woman with guidebook in
hand—the marketing strategy seems to be working.
As visitors enter the reception area, further signs of Sisi’s artfully
exploited memory abound: young women, costumed in dresses modeled
1 Gödöllő Royal Palace website. Available at: http://www.kiralyikastely.hu/

main_page (accessed October 15, 2016).
2 Two examples of companies specializing in Sisi travel are the following:
Sisi’s Road—a cultural route. Available at: http://www.sisi-strasse.info/en/
travel-packages.html(accessed October 1, 2017); and VI Groups, available at:
http://groupes.v-i.travel/voyages-groupes/circuits-autriche/sur-les-traces-
de-sissi-911.html (accessed October 1, 2016).
82 Sissi’s World
on Sisi’s own, give out violets (Sisi’s favorite flower!), and the gift shop
displays a staggering range of Sisi-memorabilia. To be fair, this Sisi-ma-
nia is tempered by generous servings of a broader Habsburg-nostalgia
or simply the “good old times,” complete with a Viennese-style café
and a “Nostalgia Photo Atelier.” In the latter, customers can dress up in
late nineteenth-century costumes—“Like in the olden days; Clothes in
every size”—and have their sepia-tinged picture taken.
Not that there is anything wrong with this. If perhaps leaning a tad
too strongly to the commercial side, the Gödöllő Royal Palace Museum
is no different from major museums and historical sites worldwide,
struggling to maintain a balance of educational activities with revenues.
What lends this Sisi-memorial as the recently established site of the Sisi
cult particular interest is that the Gödöllő Royal Palace and Hungarian
Sisi-mania can both claim a lot of history. Gifted to the royal couple on
the occasion of Francis Joseph’s coronation as Hungarian king in 1867
and used in Elisabeth’s time as the royal couple’s residence in Hungary,
the palace’s recent history quite closely mirrors that of Hungary in the
twentieth century. After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Mon-
archy it served as a residence of Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s governor
between 1920 and 1944. After the Second World War its main building
was turned into a state-run nursing home, while its wings were occu-
pied by Soviet troops.3
Like the buildings, the legacy of the Habsburgs and Elisabeth had
also suffered decades of neglect and undergone many twists and turns
both in Hungarian scholarship and popular perception. This makes the
re-emergence of such a vigorous Sisi cult not only unexpected but also
difficult to explain. Yet to date no scholarly study has explored the man-
ifestations of this recent revival, nor examined its possible sources and
the degree to which it was grounded in a rekindled, genuine affection
for the Habsburgs and/or Elisabeth, or manufactured for political and
commercial ends.
From pro-Habsburg to anti-dynastic, and from archaic to modern
and camp, the enigmatic figure of the Empress Elisabeth has, in her life
as in her death, facilitated a wide range of often competing readings. The
early twentieth-century Hungarian cult, which emerged immediately
after Elisabeth’s death, mobilized both the modern and conventional
elements of her personality and public image, mirroring the ambiguity
that made her such an intriguing figure in her lifetime. The Hungar-
ian cult reflected early twentieth-century Hungarian society’s ambiv-
alence towards modernity; it exploited Elisabeth’s habits—the dieting,
passion for exercise, and solitary walks in the countryside considered
3 The Soviet troops moved out a few years before the Red Army’s final with-
drawal from Hungary in June 1991 but left the buildings in serious disrepair.
Elisabeth’s Cult in Post-Communist Hungary 83
by contemporaries modern or unusual—and juxtaposed them with

the sacral, such as her martyrdom as a mother after Rudolf’s suicide
and the references in her cult to the Hungarian-born Saint Elizabeth.4 A
brief comparison with Elisabeth’s second cult, in the post-Communist
years, noted that the two periods of attention, separated by a century,
exploited markedly different pieces of Sisi’s enigma. A brief look at the
Gödöllő Royal Palace Museum as an emerging site of a Sisi cult sug-
gested that the bleaching out of every modern or ambivalent element
of the Empress’s personality appealed to a syrupy Habsburg nostalgia
and a version of Hungarian nationalism, both revitalized in the wake of
the end of Communism.
A closer look at the recent, post-Communist incarnation of the Sisi-
myth modifies the chronology of this conclusion and sheds further
light on its content. One might reasonably expect to find the roots of
Sisi’s re-emerging cult in the post-Communist revival of a previously
suppressed Habsburg legacy. Our evidence, however, points to a more
complex origin story; it reveals roots in the years preceding the 1989
regime change and the rekindled political and cultural ties between
Austria and Hungary in the mid-1980s that preceded—and precipi-
tated—the end of the Cold War.
The Hungarian Cult of Elisabeth in Her Life and Death

Of the three countries that can lay claim to Elisabeth—Bavaria (Ger-
many) by birth, Austria by marriage, Hungary by dynastic and senti-
mental ties—her Bavarian perception has been the least political5 and
her public image the most politicized in Hungary. This should not come
as a surprise: neither Bavaria nor Austria had the highly conflicted rela-
tionship with its respective ruling dynasties as did Hungary over the
several centuries that the country was ruled by the Habsburgs. Not only
was Elisabeth married to a Habsburg ruler, but her life as an Austrian
Empress coincided with perhaps the most fraught period of Habsburg–
Hungarian relations: the aftermath of the 1848 Hungarian revolution
and War of Independence and its bloody reprisal. Although the 1867
Compromise brought reconciliation, it did not immediately appease the
Hungarian political elite and population. Moreover, although the offi-
cial role of Elisabeth both as Austrian Empress and Hungarian Queen
4 Judith Szapor, “The Making and Re-Making of The Cult Of Elizabeth, Queen
of Hungary,” in Gender and Modernity in Central Europe: The Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy and Its Legacy, ed. Agatha Schwartz (Ottawa: The University of Ottawa
Press, 2010).
5 Alice Freifeld, “Empress Elisabeth as Hungarian Queen: The Uses of Celebrity
Monarchism” in The Limits of Loyalty; Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and
State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy, ed. Laurence Cole and Daniel L.
Unowsky (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 141.
84 Sissi’s World
was entirely ceremonial, there is sufficient evidence for—and thus room

to discuss—her substantial, if informal involvement in the negotiations
leading to the Compromise. While the degree of her actual impact can
be debated, there can be no doubt that Elisabeth’s popularity did much
to improve the public image of Francis Joseph who outlived his wife by
eighteen years.
In light of all of this, one would be justified to expect an abundance
of historical studies exploring Elisabeth’s political role and influence in
her lifetime and her myth and continuing appeal stretching all the way
to and throughout the Communist period. After all, Elisabeth was not
only the Hungarians’ favorite Habsburg but also the only one whose
legacy and memorials at least partly survived the Second World War
in Hungary. And yet a survey of recent Hungarian historical scholar-
ship indicates that, despite renewed scholarly and popular interest after
1989, narrative accounts of Elisabeth’s life, written much in the vein of
the early twentieth-century hagiographic literature, vastly outnumber
the handful of studies that critically engage with the Elisabeth phenom-
enon.
In Hungary the young historian Eszter Virág Vér has contributed the
most extensive research to the study of the Sisi cult.6 With a focus on the
period between 1866 and 1914, Vér explored memorial sites as well as
literary and historical sources that shaped the myth of Elisabeth. The
evidence she has amassed is highly impressive and will serve future
historians for a long time to come.
Vér’s former doctoral supervisor András Ger , the leading Hun-
garian historian of the Habsburgs today, represents a virtual one-man
industry when it comes to the political and social history of the Aus-
tro-Hungarian Monarchy from a Hungarian perspective. In many of his
works, including multiple editions of his biography of Francis Joseph,
Ger has repeatedly argued for the Hungarians’ need for a Habsburg
they could adopt as their own.7 He explained in the following:
[T]he need harboured by many Hungarians to identify with a

Habsburg who was willing to become assimilated to the nation
remained so persistent for good reason. It made it possible to
6 See the following: Eszter Virág Vér, “Erzsébet királyné magyarországi kultusza
1898–1914 között,” Budapesti Negyed 14, no. 2 (2006). Available at: http://epa.
oszk.hu/00000/00003/00037/erzsebetmitosz.html (accessed October 15, 2016);
“Újraértelmezett szerepvállalások, avagy Erzsébet császárné alak-változásai
1866-ban,” Aetas 27, no. 1 (2012): 83–104; and “Queen Elisabeth’s Cult in Hun-
gary Until 1914 (In the Light of Her Memorial Sites),” (doctoral dissertation,
ELTE, Budapest, 2014).
7 András GerŐ, Emperor Francis Joseph, King of Hungarians (Boulder, CO: East Euro-
pean Monographs, 2001).
combine a traditional loyalty to the monarchy going back several

centuries with the need to belong to a modern nation and a civil
society with a rich history.8
Elisabeth became so popular because she was able to reduce “the ten-
sions arising from the discrepancy between an existing need and the
absence of the right person to satisfy it.”9
In a collection of essays Ger devotes a section of the chapter, “The
Hungarian Habsburg—Need, Opportunity, Reality” to Elisabeth as
a case in point.10 In his depiction, her myth, “undisturbed by facts,”
emerged almost inevitably to fill the need for a political figure onto
whom Hungarians could project their national desires.11 To Ger , Elis-
abeth’s deeds or gestures are almost immaterial and serve only as fod-
der for the public’s appetite for a subject of adulation. “People believed
what they wanted to believe.”12 It follows from his argument—Hungar-
ians’ need to adopt a sympathetic Habsburg, whether one happened to
be at hand or not—that Ger is unmoved by any supposed evidence of
Elisabeth’s Hungarian sympathies. Debunking, one by one, the stand-
ard elements of the myth, Ger ’s healthy skepticism occasionally slips
into contrariness for its own sake. In the end, Elisabeth becomes a prop
in his broad, sweeping argument about the final separation between
symbolic politics and power politics, between the realm of narratives
and interpretations and “the actual events and actions,” with Elisabeth
clearly exemplifying the former.13
Ger is similarly skeptical of the commonly accepted view that the
empress was involved, if only informally, in precipitating the Com-
promise of 1867; her role, writes Ger , merely consisted of speaking
out in favor of it, “when it was already underway.”14 This is a point on
which Alice Freifeld, the US-based historian of the Monarchy, disagrees
with him. In a short but insightful article Freifeld does not dispute that
the official role of Elisabeth was entirely ceremonial. But she makes a
convincing case for her significant influence on shaping the Compro-
mise, highlighting such uncontested facts as her marked preference,
even against imperial custom, for Hungarian ladies-in-waiting and her
8 GerŐ, Emperor Francis Joseph, 116.

10 András GerŐ, Képzelt történelem; Fejezetek a magyar szimbolikus politika XIX–XX.
századi történetéből (Budapest: ELTE Kiadó—PolgArt, 2004). Translated into Eng-
lish as: Imagined History: Chapters from Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Hungar-
ian Symbolic Politics (Wayne, NJ: Center for Hungarian Studies and Publication,
2006), 96–103.
12 GerŐ, Imagined History, 103.
13 GerŐ, Képzelt történelem, 117. All translations from Hungarian are ours.
14 GerŐ, Imagined History, 96.
86 Sissi’s World
defiance of court precedent by “engaging in her service the liberal Hun-

garian Jewish journalist Miksa Falk.”15
Freifeld also offers a comprehensive and insightful view of both the
factual and mythical aspects of the Sisi phenomenon. Instead of treat-
ing the royals’ family affairs—as Ger does—as mere props to seduce a
naive Hungarian public, Freifeld shows how the family life of the royal
couple became part of the public’s perception and also part of Elis-
abeth’s myth. Tragic domestic events, such as the death of their young
daughter Sophie and the suicide of Rudolf, had raised public sympa-
thy and shaped Elisabeth’s and, by extension, the dynasty’s popular
image. Along with her famed beauty and carefully cultivated public
image, they helped to create what would become the leading late nine-
teenth-century example of “celebrity Monarchism,” Freifeld’s frame-
work for the Sisi-phenomenon. On par as a female royal figure only
with Queen Victoria, in time this contributed to softening the image of
Francis Joseph as well.
Vér, Ger , and Freifeld all focused their investigation on the
period of the Dual Monarchy between 1867 and 1918. But did they
have anything to say about the survival of the Elisabeth cult into
the rest of the twentieth century? In her dissertation and articles,
Vér ventured into the interwar period only reluctantly, to exam-
ine memorial sites only as far as they added to the picture of the
Monarchy period under her investigation. In an article published
in 2006, she advanced the optimistic view that in the “era of secu-
larization”—presumably our own—scholarly research will put the
legacy of the Monarchy on an entirely rational footing. Scholarship,
she added, was well equipped to deal with potentially re-awakening
cultic tendencies that in the past had shaped the myth. She also pre-
dicted that in the future Elisabeth would be appreciated as a modern
woman well ahead of her time.16 Regretfully, neither of these predic-
tions has yet been realized.
In his 2004 monograph, Ger stretched his point about the continu-
ing appeal of the Elisabeth myth continuing into the rest of the twenti-
eth century: “The Hungarian nation has not forgotten her to this day.”17
He offered the evidence of the continuing use of Elisabeth’s name for a
Danube bridge and Budapest district, even in periods when the memory
15 Freifeld, “Empress Elisabeth as Hungarian Queen,” 151.

16 Eszter Virág Vér, “Az Erzsébet mítosz” [The Elizabeth myth], Budapesti Negyed
52, no. 2 (2006): 20. Available at: http://epa.oszk.hu/00000/00003/00037/
erzsebetmitosz.html (accessed October 11, 2016).
17 GerŐ, Képzelt történelem, 2004, 117. In the English edition the statement turned
into the significantly tamer, “She is still remembered today.” Imagined History,
2006, 103.
of all other Habsburgs had been erased from public space—but gave no
additional proof of the continuation of her cult in popular memory.18
A survey of Hungary’s most popular female names in recent dec-
ades offers a hint of a waning influence: Erzsébet, the Hungarian form
of Elisabeth, long among the most popular given names, has in the last
fifteen years disappeared from the list of the hundred most popular
names; it is no longer the mainstay of flower and gift shops, which in
the past justifiably expected a jump in revenue on November 19, the
name day for Elisabeth, so widely celebrated by Hungarians in the past.
While more recently adopted, “Westernized” forms of the name such
as Elizabet (sic!), Elza, and Alíz today rank prominently on the list, the
traditional, Hungarian version of the name has become associated with
an older demographic, and, in a broader sense, with a past that has a
tinge of the antiquated or hollowed out.
It is Freifeld, perhaps the most insistent of the three historians in
limiting her investigation to the era of the Monarchy, who provides illu-
minating insight into the particular Hungarian character and longev-
ity of the Elisabeth-cult. Concluding the discussion of Elisabeth’s role
around the Compromise, Freifeld offers a broad definition of the polit-
ical impact of the “celebrity Monarch.” Contrary to Ger ’s traditional,
narrow view of political influence, Freifeld suggests that Sisi influenced
political decisions in multiple ways during her lifetime: “first, in help-
ing to defuse the Hungarian martyrology of revolutionary defeat in the
1850s; second, in fashioning Dualism between 1863 and 1867; third,
as a justifying icon of the Compromise in representing liberal values,
espousing greater rights for women, sympathy for Jews, and skepti-
cism about the monarchy’s future”19—and, we should add, thus, para-
doxically, contributing to the Empire’s survival. This allows Freifeld to
ground Elisabeth’s continuing appeal in Hungary in the specific turn
Hungarian nationalism took after the First World War towards an over-
whelming sense of victimization. After her death, concludes Freifeld,
Elisabeth “has come to symbolize a martyrdom that is personal, famil-
ial, but also one identified with the fall of the Kingdom of St. Stephen
and Hungary’s sense of having lost its way in the twentieth century.”20
Freifeld’s last point highlights a fundamental trait of Hungarian
nationalism that perceived the nation as the perpetual victim of foreign
oppression. This view of Hungarian history—of always ending up on
18 András GerŐ, “Egy magyar kultusz: Erzsébet királyné,” in Erzsébet, a magyarok

királynéja, ed. Katalin F. Dózsa (Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, 1992), 14;
and “Az Erzsébet-kultusz,” in Erzsébet a magyarok királynéja, ed. Árpád Rácz
(Budapest: Rubicon, 2001), 133.
88 Sissi’s World
the losing side, abandoned by ungrateful allies, undermined by internal

enemies—became particularly pronounced after the Trianon Treaty in
1920 and was given new life after 1989. And it might at least partially
explain Sisi’s continuing appeal in Hungary after the First World War
but also after the 1989 regime change. It forms a foundation from which
to investigate the revival of her memory and, possibly, the resurrection
of her cult in the late twentieth century.
More detailed studies that trace the persistence of an attachment of
specific segments of Hungarian society (along socio-economic, politi-
cal, ethnic, religious, and cultural lines) to this most popular Habsburg
and the Habsburgs in general in the rest of the twentieth century would
be needed to explore the scope of a popular Habsburg-nostalgia in the
first decade of the post-Communist period and deconstruct its political,
cultural, and emotional elements. In the absence of such studies, a sur-
vey of museum exhibitions and publications (both scholarly and pop-
ular historical), written on Elisabeth and published in Hungary from
the mid-1980s to the present, provides a view of the emergence of the
Royal Palace Museum at Gödöll as the center of the popular and schol-
arly revival of Elizabeth’s legacy. The Gödöllő Royal Palace, gradually
restored to its former glory between 1985 and 2010, did not as much
lead a revival of Elisabeth’s cult as, rather, ride the wave of an already
emerging one and overlapped with its high period, the decade from the
early 1990s to the early 2000s.
The exhibitions and activities of the Royal Palace Museum, along
with a number of exhibitions at other venues and publications, success-
fully mobilized vestiges of a revived Habsburg nostalgia. From the early
1990s on, a decidedly commercial element became intertwined with the
scholarly re-assessment of Elisabeth and the Habsburgs. In place of the
sober scholarly treatment as a driving force of scholarship as prescribed
by Eszter Virág Vér in her 2006 article, clear signs of emerging “cul-
tic” patterns have appeared. Scholarly re-assessments of Elisabeth, the
Habsburgs, and other crucial periods and figures of Hungarian history
are increasingly grounded in emotional, rather than rational motives,
driven by political agendas and, as in the case of the Gödöll Museum,
by the commercial pressures of a global tourist industry. They cater to a
generic, pseudo-historical nostalgia that has little to do with any specif-
ically Hungarian view of the Habsburgs—or, for that matter, Elisabeth
herself.
The death of Francis Joseph in 1916 and the dissolution of the Dual
Monarchy and dethroning of the Habsburgs in 1918 changed Hungari-
ans’ relationship with the dynasty’s members—living and dead alike—
in fundamental ways. In Hungary, nominally still a kingdom, whose
regent Miklós Horthy had been the adjutant of the old Emperor, no less,
the two botched attempts of Charles IV to reclaim his Hungarian throne
ended royalism as a legitimate political force. The cult of Elisabeth,

however, was not immediately extinguished, although it never reached
the frenzied levels of the previous decades. Memorials were still being
built in the interwar period, including statues by the period’s leading
official (not to say court) sculptor, György Zala, who completed four
major Elisabeth memorials between 1901 and 1932.21 The last one was
erected in Budapest in 1932 at the foot of the Buda side of the bridge
also named after the queen.
After 1945 most signs of the Habsburg presence were erased from
public space. But while the statues of Francis Joseph were promptly
removed, and the name of the Danube bridge changed from Francis
Joseph to “Freedom,” most of Elisabeth’s statues remained in place.
Even the bridge rebuilt in 1964—the last to restore the string of Buda-
pest’s Danube bridges blown up by the retreating German army in
1944–1945—retained the queen’s name. So did the Budapest district
(Elisabethtown) and a wide avenue named Queen Elisabeth on the
edge of the inner city.22
In 1985, when Zala’s statue of Elisabeth reappeared on Döbrentei
Square, few must have noticed. The square on the Buda side, in the
shadow of the Elisabeth bridge and major arteries of the badly con-
gested and polluted city, served as an unappealing junction of bus and
streetcar lines and was never a favorite with pedestrians or frequented
by tourists. And yet, in retrospect, it was likely the first sign that Elis-
abeth was called to task, once more, to serve as the great conciliator of
Austrians and Hungarians.
Act One of the Sisi Revival: The Forgotten 1980s

The newest offshoots of the Sisi cult appeared in the mid-1980s. The
queen’s appearance and the re-emergence of a previously silenced,
popular royalist tradition was not unrelated to the 1989 regime change,
but preceded it. The Elisabeth cult was not an independent, mass phe-
nomenon but was one element in the quest for ideological support and
identity of a country in deep crisis on every level.
By the mid-1980s, the Kádár-regime had become the soft underbelly
of Communist-ruled East Central Europe. The very term, East Central
21 Zala was also the maker of the monumental equestrian statue of Count Gyula
Andrássy Sr., whose friendship with Elisabeth gave fodder to the—unfounded—
rumor of an amorous relationship. This statue, along with the memorial of the
pre-war conservative Prime Minister István Tisza, was re-cast and placed in
recent years at its original location, in front of the Hungarian Parliament.
22 The two sections of the Budapest Ring, itself fashioned after the the Ring in
Vienna and named after Habsburgs: Elisabeth and Theresa, were renamed
Lenin in 1950, until 1990 when they regained their former imperial names.
90 Sissi’s World
Europe (with emphasis on the Central) came to be used to describe

three countries, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland in these years
by dissident intellectuals intent on reclaiming their countries’ historical
and cultural ties to the West.23 Two of these countries and a large chunk
of the third used to belong to the Habsburg Monarchy.
Well in advance of these developments, Hungarian historical schol-
arship offered a radical re-assessment of Hungary’s political and eco-
nomic position within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. As early
as 1971 György Ránki, Iván T. Berend, and, most importantly, Péter
Hanák offered a critical re-appraisal of the orthodox Marxist view that
had since the Second World War described the relationship as based on
Hungary’s economic and political subjugation.24 By 1978, this revision-
ist assessment had made its way into the university textbooks.25
Hungary’s increasingly perceptible political crisis in the 1980s was
paired with economic openness towards the West, which took the form
of skyrocketing loans and membership in the IMF but also increasing
political and cultural ties with Western countries. Hungarians, now
quite freely able to travel, grew frustrated with the gap they perceived
between the consumerist West and their own stagnating living stand-
ards. Hungary’s neighbor and “gateway to the West” was Austria, and
it provided a ready comparison because of the two countries’ shared
past. Some, if not most of the newly established ties were commercial,
but they were also intertwined with cultural and personal connec-
tions. Scholarly exchanges and state-sanctioned co-operation between
cultural institutions were supported by international agreements and
eagerly pursued by an Austrian government that had long fashioned
itself as a bridge to the East and did not hesitate to combine economic
incentives with efforts to precipitate Communism’s end.
Austria may have become Hungarians’ reference point for a consum-
erist present, but the growing ties between the two countries increas-
ingly alluded to their shared past. The 1980s also saw a sudden jump
of interest in the Monarchy’s cultural legacy: its café culture, cabaret,
23 Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books,
April 26, 1984 is a good example of this influential trend. In his classic essay the
brilliant medievalist Jenő Szűcs offered a long-durée perspective of the region’s
place between the West and the East. “Vázlat Európa három történeti régió-
járól,” Történelmi Szemle 3 (1981): 313–59; translated to English as: “The Three
Historical Regions of Europe: An Outline,” Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum
Hungariae 29 (1983): 131–84.
24 Péter Hanák, “Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: Preponderance or
Dependency?” Austrian History Yearbook 3 (1967): 260–302; in Hungarian: “Mag-
yarország az Osztrák-Magyar Monarchiában—túlsúly vagy függőség?” in Mag-
yarország a Monarchiában, ed. Péter Hanák (Budapest: Gondolat, 1975).
25 Péter Hanák, ed., Magyarország története 1890–1918 (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1978).
operetta and, generally, the “happy times of peace.” Important films,

such as István Szabó’s Colonel Redl (1985), addressed the period. The
Hungarian political leadership welcomed historians’ new preoccupa-
tion with the fin de siècle, in place of such traumatic and divisive top-
ics as Hungary’s participation in the Second World War, the Holocaust,
and the Hungarian ethnic minorities beyond the borders.
Remembrance of members of the Habsburg family was not far
behind: in historical literature Brigitte Hamann’s biography of Elisabeth
was published in Hungarian translation in 1988.26 The leading Hungar-
ian director, Miklós Jancsó’s film about the sexual escapades of Rudolf,
titled Public Vices, Private Pleasures (Magánbűnök és közerkölcsök) was
completed in 1976, but it was screened in Hungary only once, on the
director’s 65th birthday. (A Hungarian premiere would not take place
until the late 1980s.) According to urban legend, it was none other than
the wife of János Kádár, the famously puritanical Hungarian party
leader, who spoke out vehemently against the distribution of the film at
a private screening. The film divided the critics as well—some hailed it
for its independence and artistic freedom while others deemed it cheap
pornography.27
While this controversial film could not influence the emergence of
the Elisabeth cult, the Ernst Marischka trilogy, starring Romy Schnei-
der, that made it to the Hungarian TV screens in 1986, did. The Hungar-
ian version merged the three films into one and even tailored the title to
Hungarian tastes: Sissi—the Queen of Hungarians.28 Since that year, this
version has become regular Christmas fare (the empress was born on
Christmas Eve) on Hungarian TV channels. Around the same time the
Marischka trilogy was adapted, Hungarian TV viewers were offered
another, romantic treatment of the Mayerling tragedy, starring Omar
Sharif and Catherine Deneuve.29
Evidently, at this time Hungarians were more committed to reviving
the social and cultural connections of their shared past with Austria
than to the tradition of resisting an occupying foreign power, by then
exclusively associated with the Soviet Union. As the regime change
26 Brigitte Hamann, Erzsébet királyné (Budapest: Árkádia, 1988). Hamann’s biogra-

phy of Rudolf and the Habsburg dictionary were both published in Hungarian
translation in 1990.
27 Giacomo Gambetti, “A történelem gúnyt űz az emberekből?” Filmvilág 12 (1981):
5–8; Mihály Kornis, “A történelem csinos rabszolgái,” Filmvilág 5 (1986): 3–8.
28 The original titles are Sissi (1955); Sissi—die junge Kaiserin (1956); and Sissi—
Schiksaljahre einer Kaiserin (1957) dir. Ernst Marischka. A better known Hungar-
ian aspect of the trilogy is the coincidence of the last film with the Hungarian
1956 revolution, reportedly contributing to the Austrian public’s sympathy
towards the Hungarian refugees.
29 Mayerling, dir. Terence Young, 1968.
92 Sissi’s World
approached and public discourse increasingly highlighted the shared

Austro-Hungarian past, the historical actors themselves appeared on
the scene of their former familial empire. In the Summer of 1987, Otto
Habsburg visited Hungary almost seventy years after he had left. He
arrived in Hungary as a private citizen without any fanfare and with
the approval of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Party leader-
ship. His next visit coincided with the forced retirement of the aging
Hungarian party leader Kádár in May 1988; this time the private citizen
visited public sites, catching the attention of an ambivalent public.30 In
1989 when Otto arrived with a European Parliamentary delegation, his
visit seemed to have provoked more controversy in Western European
left and labor circles than among Hungarian reform communists.31
How the Habsburgs Demolished the Iron Curtain

The most memorable event associated with Otto was without a doubt
the Pan-European Picnic held on August 19, 1989 organized by, among
others, the Pan European Union under Otto’s presidency.32 Otto was
represented by his daughter, Walburga, also an official of the Union. As
she remembered, “The goal was to call attention to the fact that Hun-
gary is part of Europe and wants to become part of the developments
there.”33 The event symbolically lifted the Iron Curtain in 1989 by open-
ing the border between Austria and Hungary for a few hours while
residents of the local villages from both sides were invited to have a
barbeque with the assembled dignitiaries. It also led to the crossing of
the border by 600 to 800 East German citizens, some of the many thou-
sands who waited in limbo in Hungary that summer—as the Hungar-
ian border guards stood by, letting them escape.34 Although some of
30 As MTI (the Hungarian Telegraph Agency) reported on July 18, 1988, upon the
visit of Otto von Habsburg “some welcomed him with joyful enthusiasm, others
with reservations, not only anxious of the return of old times but also that his
visit will benefit one of the political sides.” Available at: http://mnl.gov.hu/a_
het_dokumentuma/habsburg_otto_magyarorszagi_latogatasai__19871989.
html (accessed October 11, 2016).
31 Kocsis Piroska, “Habsburg Ottó magyarországi látogatásai (1987–1989),”
Archívum Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár, November. 19, 2012. Available at: http://
mnl.gov.hu/a_het_dokumentuma/habsburg_otto_magyarorszagi_latogata-
sai__19871989.html (accessed October 11, 2016).
32 The idea was forged at Otto von Habsburg’s meeting with the Debrecen branch
of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the first oppositional party founded before
the elections.
33 “Walburga Habsburg Douglas: A páneurópai piknik okozta ‘az első rést’ a vas-
függönyön,” Hirado.hu, August 18, 2014. Available at: http://www.hirado.
hu/2014/08/18/walburga-habsburg-douglas-a-paneuropai-piknik-okoz-
ta-az-elso-rest-a-vasfuggonyon/ (accessed October 11, 2016).
34 The Iron Curtain was already breached physically in May 1989 with the demoli-
tion of the barbed wire fence along the border between the two countries.
the details of the event are still shrouded in mystery, and the archives
remain closed, the events produced the perfect meeting of symbolic and
practical politics and involved the co-operation of the Hungarian gov-
ernment with Otto, the most respected Habsburg.35
Following the regime change, the presence of the Habsburg family
became more regular and one might say even a permanent political fix-
ture in Hungary: in the early 1990s Habsburg visits, dinners, and the
weddings of two of Otto’s children were followed by massive public
interest and were widely reported in the tabloids. A storied Budapest
restaurant, the Gundel, was the site of the wedding reception of Wal-
burga and her Swedish husband. The restaurant was decorated in the
Hungarian national colors and some of the courses replicated those
served on the occasion of the coronation of Francis Joseph in 1867.36
In its report on Walburga’s engagement, the daily of Vas county, Hun-
gary’s westernmost and perhaps most royalist region, even risked this
rhetorical question addressed to the groom, only half in jest: “Would
he accept the presidency of the Hungarian Republic?”37 At the time, in
early 1990, a referendum had just decided to allow the next, democrati-
cally elected parliament to nominate the president, and before the elec-
tions nobody could tell who the nominees would be. Although Otto’s
name and even the idea of re-establishing the monarchy was publicly
mentioned, it was quickly taken off the agenda.
The Habsburg family’s potential political role was quickly overtaken
by much more burning historical questions awaiting their moral and
legal resolution. The public was more preoccupied with determining
restitution for the victims of the 1956 revolution, the task of accounting
for the crimes of communism, the re-assessement of the interwar Hor-
thy-period, or the compensation of the churches for their confiscated
properties. Yet in the early years after the regime change, the public
seemed to have an endless appetite for historical pageantry and cer-
emonies. Funerals and re-burials followed one after the other, each
staking out a particular political stance. Old-fashioned uniforms and
ceremonial habits appeared from a past thought long gone.38
35 For a recent overview of details of the event, see György Gyarmati, ed. Prelude to
Demolishing the Iron Curtain; Pan-European Picnic, Sopron 19 August 1989 (Sopron,
Budapest: L’Harmattan, Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security,
2012).
36 “Esküvői vacsora a Gundelben.” Available at: http://gyula.czegledy.hu/cgi-
bin/czc/index.cgi?mod=3&id=553&rovat_id=10 (accessed Novomber 3, 2017).
37 Somogyi Megyei Hírlap, Hungaricana, December 7, 1992. Avalailable at: https://
library.hungaricana.hu/hu/view/SomogyMegyeiHirlap_1992_12/?p-
g=87&layout=s (accessed September 23, 2016).
38 In 1990 the first democratically elected government introduced the Parliamen-
tary Guard, whose uniform was modeled on the Horthy era’s similar outfit, in
turn modeled on a sixteenth-century military costume.
94 Sissi’s World
In the early years after 1989, the royal family shared the spotlight
with aristocrats. Historical families had their geneologies published
and their hardship suffered under Communism recounted in inter-
views and tabloids. Since 1992 Budapest has held an annual Opera
ball, similar to the one in Vienna, with the glamorous outfits conjur-
ing an idealized, long gone past. But this was all a matter of appear-
ances; after all, the royals did not take over government, and the
aristocrats did not become the political establishment, even if some
aristocrats—including one of Otto’s sons—may have received dip-
lomatic positions or represented Hungary in international organiza-
tions.39
The Sisi Industry: Historians and the Resurrection of the

Elisabeth Myth
This was the context of the virtual Habsburg and Sisi-industry that
emerged in the early 1990s. Historians and museologists, instrumental
in the revival of the Habsburg legacy as early as the late 1980s, skill-
fully applied Elisabeth’s image, in her life as in her afterlife, to mediate
between Hungarians and the Habsburgs, in the rewarmed Hungar-
ian–Austrian friendship of the 1980s. Already in 1987 two local muse-
ums, including the Gödöll City Museum, commemorated the queen’s
150th anniversary with small exhibitions.40 In 1991 the Museum of Aus-
trian Culture in Eisenstadt collaborated with the Hungarian National
Museum on an exhibition titled “Sisi Elizabeth (sic!), Queen of Hun-
garians”; it was remounted the following year, in 1992 at the Hungar-
ian National Museum. The short studies of the Hungarian exhibition’s
modest catalogue introduced the main contributors—András Ger and
Katalin F. Dózsa—to the Sisi revival and established the outlines of the
narratives of her life, political role, and relationship with Hungarians
for the next decade and beyond.41
The decade between 1991 and 2001 represented the high period of
this revival, starting with the 1991 to 1992 exhibitions, continuing with
the musical Elisabeth,42 lavishly produced issues of two glossy historical
39 One of Otto’s sons, György, settled in Hungary in 1993. He was the president
of the Hungarian Red Cross between 2004 and 2012. In 2009 he ran for election
for the European Parliament on the list of a small conservative party but was
unsuccessful—he could not repeat the feat of his father who represented the
CSU in Strasbourg for twenty years.
40 1987, Gödöllő Városi Helytörténeti Gyűjtemény kiállítása Erzsébet Királyné
születésének 150. évfordulóján. GerŐ, “Egy magyar kultusz,” 14.
41 Katalin F. Dózsa, ed., Erzsébet, a magyarok királynéja: kiállítás a Magyar Nemzeti
(Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, 1992).
42 The production of the Budapest Operetta Theater in 1996 followed closely the
1992 premiere in Vienna and two productions in Japan.
magazines,43 and ending with a coffee table book, all dedicated to Elis-
abeth.44 During the same time, András Ger published the second edition
of his 1988 biography of Francis Joseph, another book on the relationship
of Francis Joseph and the Hungarians; and he also contributed countless
articles on all things Habsburg, along with adding his voice to virtu-
ally every scholarly and popular publication on Elisabeth. In 2003, Ger
became the director of the newly founded Habsburg Institute.
The other mainstay of this burgeoning literature is the costume histo-
rian and textile expert Katalin F. Dózsa. She describes herself as an “art
historian, the curator of several exhibitions on Elisabeth, and an expert
of her dressing”45 and has a highly impressive résumé as a curator and
university professor. In countless publications she has covered such
diverse topics as Elisabeth’s relics, celebrated beauty, relationship with
the Habsburg court, and even sexuality. As the advisor of the Gödöll
Royal Palace Museum for a number of years, F. Dózsa was presumably
responsible for some of the visual representation of Elisabeth there. Her
passion for the glamorous outfits and the trendsetting fashion sense of
the queen may have translated into the dresses seen throughout the
Gödöll Palace, worn by young ushers or displayed in the empty corri-
dors. According to her personal web page, F. Dózsa was also involved
in some of the activities of the Museum, such as the Elisabeth look-alike
contests of the early years.46 The restoration of the Gödöll Royal Palace
and the opening of the Museum in 1996 signaled an important new
chapter in the Hungarian Sisi cult and created a new center for it.
A New Site for the Sisi Cult: The Gödöllő Royal Palace
Museum
As the cult of the Habsburgs and Sisi revived in the late 1980s seemed
to have run its course and the public’s appetite for glamorous aristo-
cratic balls was sated,47 the physical legacy of the country’s aristocratic
history continued to be restored. The Gödöll Royal Palace Museum,
whose restoration from 1985 and opening in 1996 so perfectly fit into
43 História 1998, special issue. Rubikon featured the queen on three of its covers
between 1990 and 1999. Rubikon issues 1990, no. 6; 1992, no. 4; and 1999, nos.
9–10 all contained multiple articles on Elisabeth. The 2007, no. 2 special issue
was entirely dedicated to Elisabeth.
44 Károly Rácz, ed., Erzsébet, a magyarok királynéja (Budapest: Rubicon, 2001).
45 Katalin F. Dózsa, Introduction to Sisi legendák (Budapest: Kossuth, 2016), n.p.
46 The blog of Katalin F. Dózsa. http://www.fashion-guide.hu/?668-f-dr-doz-
sa-katalin-muveszettortenesz-c-egyetemi-tanar (accessed October 15, 2016).
47 By the end of the 1990s the liberal weekly Magyar Narancs openly mocked an
aristocratic, charitable event. See Róbert Winkler, “Arisztid és Tasziló (VII.
Jótékonysági Apor-bál a Szent Gellért Szállóban).” Available at: http://mag-
yarnarancs.hu/tudomany/arisztid_es_taszilo_vii_jotekonysagi_apor-bal_a_
szent_gellert_szalloban-57704 (accessed October 11, 2016).
96 Sissi’s World
the chronology of the Hungarian Sisi revival, has not only become the
new center of the Hungarian cult but also seems to have weathered its
decline.
The Gödöllő Palace Museum has become a Hungarian bastion of all
things Habsburg, and the town has by now become almost synony-
mous with the Royal Palace. Due to its proximity to Budapest, easy
access by suburban train and bicycle, acres of the fully restored royal
park, and other cultural attractions, it has become a major tourist des-
tination. Between 2004 and 2014 the Palace Museum was among the
country’s ten most visited destinations, with attendance between
140,000 and 180,000 per year, placing it ahead of a number of popular,
well-established Budapest museums.48 There are no statistics available
on the distribution of visitors by country or age, although repeated vis-
its to the Museum suggest a good proportion of them might come with
organized school and seniors’ groups and from abroad.
The Museum’s success cannot be explained by the draw of the exhi-
bitions alone; it is more likely due to the combination of good adver-
tising and the spectacular restoration of the complex of buildings and
park over the last two decades. A delightful example of late Baroque,
the Palace was in deplorable condition at the time of the regime change.
At the Museum’s opening in 1996 only the main building was open to
visitors; since then significant sums from the European Union and var-
ious levels of government have been poured into the reconstruction of
the park, the wings and auxiliary buildings, as well as the art, furniture,
and decorative objects adorning the interiors. The Museum struck a
major coup when it hosted the governmental meetings during Hunga-
ry’s rotating presidency of the European Union in the first half of 2011.
Damaged and looted many times in its history from the 1848–1849
Revolution and War of Independence to the end of the Second World
War, the castle retained very little of the original interiors; many of the
objects displayed in the permanent exhibition are on loan from the
Hungarian National Museum. Unusually for a Hungarian museum—
but perhaps as a sign of things to come—some of the objects have been
loaned by or restored with funds from private individuals. The exhi-
bition advances chronologically, and visitors are first directed to the
rooms displaying the history of the Grassalkovich family, the Palace’s
owners from the early to the late eighteenth century. The friendship
of the builder Antal Grassalkovich with the Empress Maria Theresa is
the first opportunity left unfulfilled to provide some historical context
and explore historical parallels between Elisabeth and another female
Habsburg beloved by Hungarians.
48 MuseumStat, available at: www.museumstat.hu (accessed October 13, 2016).

Elisabeth herself makes the first appearance in room no. 18, and from
there on becomes the singular focus of the exhibition. Her many por-
traits, surrounded by paintings of family members and notable men of
the late nineteenth century, are mounted without any explanation of the
political and social context. Near the end of the nineteenth century, the
monumental or more intimate paintings are gradually replaced by pho-
tographs, newspaper articles, and illustrations. But important social
and cultural changes, such as photography and the rise of the popular
press, instrumental in the rise of Elisabeth as a cult figure in her lifetime,
remain equally unaddressed.
It seems that the curators were content to furnish the rooms with his-
torically and stylistically accurate objects without investigating further.
They highlight biographical details that are flattering to Hungarians
and fit into the Sisi-myth—for instance, the “Hungarian” upbringing
of Elisabeth’s youngest daughter, Marie Valerie, is prominently men-
tioned, but the fact that as an adult she kept a wide berth of anything
Hungarian and never visited Hungary is not mentioned. The exhibits
appear to pay homage, befitting a shrine, rather than attempting to
offer historical context and interpretation—perhaps explained by the
museum’s efforts to succeed as a profitable enterprise in Hungary’s
new, capitalist era.
In the rooms displaying the history of the Palace following the death
of the royal couple, the permanent exhibition offers more food for
thought—although likely not as a result of the curators’ intentions, but
because of the highly turbulent times they reflect. The last Habsburg
emperor, the melancholy Charles IV, spent only a few days—most of
them at the end of his rule, in October 1918—at Gödöll .49 After a brief
occupancy by the command of the Red Army during the short-lived
Hungarian Republic of Councils and by Romanian troops after the fall
of the revolution, Admiral Horthy, the governor of Hungary, turned the
Palace into his family’s summer residence. Horthy’s massive portrait,
adorning one of the rooms, fits seamlessly into the style of the royal por-
traits of the previous rooms. And his personal items exhibited here—
driving goggles, paper knife, handkerchief—seem like mere props in a
play, just like the objects of the Palace’s previous inhabitants on display.
Curators and visitors alike appear to be placed in the role of the Pal-
ace’s long gone servants, whose perspective would remain constant—
regardless of whom they served or whose belongings they cared for.
49 It is another indication of the waning interest of the Hungarian public in the

Habsburgs that his beatification in 2004 failed to generate much interest in Hun-
gary. And if further proof was needed, a lookout tower in the Buda hills, once
visited by the queen, was recently restored and re-named Elisabeth—but locals
go on calling it by its old, colloquial name.
98 Sissi’s World
This chronological, value-neutral approach has the unintended effect of

making the central character of the next couple of rooms—Dr. Aladár
Ozoray, from 1959 to 1979 the director of the nursing home established
in the Palace—almost equal in significance to the monarchs and leaders.
To historians of the Kádár era and to the schoolchildren and foreign vis-
itors, Dr. Ozoray’s cherished personal objects (his Russian-made wrist-
watch or his government award of Outstanding Healthcare Worker)
are just as valuable historical documents indeed as those from earlier
centuries.
Equally interesting and taking the audience even further from the
“happy times of peace” of the early twentieth century is the collection
of letters addressed to the Soviet soldiers stationed in the Palace. The
letters were found in an unused cupboard during the recent renova-
tions. The short passages translated from Russian testify to the concerns
of anxious relatives in the Soviet Union: food shortages, deprivations,
and the fervent wish for the return of the young men. These last rooms
are not at all what visitors would expect to see at the Gödöll Royal Pal-
ace Museum. But if they do make it this far, on their way to the exit and
the Nostalgia Photo Atelier, it is where they will get the most accurate
sense of the unpredictability of Hungary’s history in the last century.
Conclusion: Sisi the Avatar

From May to September 2016, visitors leaving the Museum could take
in the very large poster hanging next to the entrance, advertising the
exhibition titled “Treasures of the Past Twenty Years.” The exhibition
celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Museum’s founding; the post-
er’s background featured Elisabeth’s handwriting, the beginning of her
famed “Dear Ida” letter written in Hungarian to her favourite lady-
in-waiting, Ida Ferenczy. In the foreground stands an empty dress, its
shape, with the famously slim waist and violet-blue color, conjuring
up the empress (Figure 4.1). Did the curators contemplate the possi-
ble meanings of the picture? Or did they simply use an image on the
poster that was neutral, pleasant, and referred to Sisi without limiting
the exhibition’s scope to her?
Whatever may be the case, the empty dress of the enigmatic empress
reinforces the point that Sisi’s figure, both in a historical and a sartorial
sense, has offered an empty vessel into which individuals and nations
could project their desires, sympathies, and frustrations. In the Hungar-
ian context, rather than filling a need, it has provided a space to be filled
with political content of all kinds—including, in this case, the current
Hungarian government’s ongoing efforts to whitewash the legacy of
the Horthy-era.
In a recent interview András Ger lamented the lack of appreciation
for Francis Joseph in present-day Hungary. Regardless of the ruthless
Figure 4.1 Gödöll Palace, Hungary: Empty Sisi dress.

100 Sissi’s World
reprisal the Habsburg court meted out to the rebellious Hungarians

after 1849, argued Ger , the emperor deserved a public monument as
the ruler responsible for Hungary’s post-1867 economic boom and, gen-
erally, the “happy times of peace” that lasted until 1914. For someone so
instrumental in laying the foundation of the Elisabeth cult in the early
1990s, Ger is curiously dismissive of the empress. When asked why
there is so little about her in his new book, titled Francis Joseph and the
Hungarians, he curtly replies, “the book is not about Elisabeth.”50 The
point Ger makes about the lack of popular appreciation for Francis
Joseph and his times however is worth considering: has the Hungarian
public indeed abandoned its affection for Francis Joseph’s times?
Does not the popularity of the Gödöll Museum signal otherwise?
This extended look at the Museum’s displays suggests that Elisabeth
has been invoked to accomplish yet another act of reconciliation:
between the memory of Hungarians’ fight against foreign oppressors
and the Habsburgs, and between the “good old times of peace” once
associated with the rule of Francis Joseph and the interwar period of
Miklós Horthy.
The local government of Gödöll has designated the Museum as a
space for “cultural events of high standard, devoid of any politics.”51
The permanent exhibition seems to have answered the call: it lavishly
illustrates but offers no critical perspective on the Sisi-myth in a man-
ner mirrored in the recently installed rooms about the Horthy family
and the postwar period. With the removal of potentially uncomfortable
details (virtually any reference to Hungary’s fraught relationship with
the Habsburgs), the museum displays a history of the Palace’s two cen-
turies that may have had some twists and turns—but is not likely to
offend anyone, be that a visitor from Hungary or from abroad. Visitors,
most likely there to see the Sisi memorabilia, are led through rooms
that represent the history of the Gödöll Palace as a seamless contin-
uum of family histories. They proceed from the Grassalkovichs through
the Habsburgs to the Horthys and even to the Ozorays, each family
depicted in moments of joy and heartbreak, but all of them enveloped
in hues of sepia, without any reference to their respective historical con-
text and the complex and controversial legacy the palace represents for
Hungary. And the at once dutiful and rebellious empress, now in death
as in her lifetime, continues to obey higher interests and play her part.
50 “Szobrot érdemel Ferenc József—GerŐ András a Mandinernek,” Mandiner, Oct.

5, 2016, interview with András GerŐ. Available at: http://tortenelem.mandiner.
hu/cikk/20161005_szobrot_erdemel_ferenc_jozsef_gero_andras_a_mandin-
ernek (accessed November 3, 2017).
51 Lilla Csaplár, “Sisi még ma is bennünk él,” Demokrata, Jan. 2, 2013. Available at:
http://www.demokrata.hu/cikk/sisi-meg-ma-bennunk-el (accessed August
26, 2016).
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Five A Place for Sissi in Trieste
Maura E. Hametz and Borut Klabjan
Since 1997, rail passengers exiting Trieste’s Central Station have peered
across the bustling Corso Cavour to catch a glimpse of “Elisabetta.”1
The bronze statue of the Habsburg empress, “Sissi” to Triestines, stands
in Piazza della Libertà (Liberty Square) welcoming those arriving by
train or traveling by car via the coastal highway as they enter the Adri-
atic port city. Dedicated in December 1912 in Piazza della Stazione (Sta-
tion Square), then removed nine years later from the renamed Piazza
della Libertà, the Elisabetta statue spent most of the twentieth century
in storage or out of public view. Like other monuments restored in the
last two decades in Trieste/Trst/Triest, it was re-sited in 1997, and now
stands in the square in front of the railway station.2 Elisabetta’s resur-
rection, like that of other monuments, reflects the complicated memory
of the Habsburg Empress and Triestines’ struggle with the legacies of
the city’s past, as the Habsburg empire faded from view and nation
states emerged and re-emerged along the coasts of the Adriatic Sea.
Trieste’s Elisabetta is imbued with the cultural and political signif-
icance that the memory of Empress Elisabeth infuses in statues dedi-
cated to her across Central Europe. Visions of her permeate historical
literature and are embodied in the Sissi myth that allows the spirit of
the charismatic, if enigmatic, Habsburg empress to linger in the lands
of the former empire. In Trieste, the imperial port that experienced Cold
War divisions and has been the site of ethnic rancor, persecution, and
conflict since the mid-nineteenth century, the figure of Elisabeth is a
1 “Elisabetta” is the name inscribed on the marble plinth at the statue’s base.
2 On first mention, place names are in languages used in the locality since the late
nineteenth century. Subsequent mentions use toponyms common in the locality
in the nation-state context today (i.e. Italian in current day Italy, Slovenian in
current day Slovenia, and Croatian in current day Croatia). Trieste (Italian), Trst
(Slovene and Croatian), and Triest (German) recognize the multi-ethnic, trans-
national nature of the Adriatic city. Hereafter, the city is referred to as Trieste, its
Italian and common English name.
104 Sissi’s World
prism with facets refracting light that appears, depending on the per-
spective, in various colors of competing nationalist currents and polit-
ical agendas. At the same time, Sissi’s figure in bronze set against the
adjacent plaza, where dozens of buses wait to head out to various parts
of the city and its environs, and in sight of the port facilities for mari-
time traffic from around the world, forms the backdrop to the modern
city. The marble slabs flanking the statue invite further associations as
reminders of Elisabeth’s reputed protection of the peoples of the empire
and of her role as a patron and admirer of nature and the arts. They
express political conceptions of nation, notions of class, and perceptions
of gender relations. More than a century after the controversial statue’s
inauguration Elisabetta serves as a reminder of the contested political
and cultural legacy of the Habsburg monarchy, and continues to spark
debate and inflame tempers in the Adriatic lands.3 The statue’s sig-
nificance runs deep: the monument to the enigmatic empress invokes
visions of Trieste’s mythic or imagined past. Although Elisabeth’s phys-
ical presence in the Habsburg port was ephemeral and fleeting, the stat-
ue’s influence and longevity reflect on her image and imagined role as
a protector of all peoples of the Adriatic Littoral and as a representative
of the monarchy.
Death of the Empress

On September 10, 1898, the Empress Elisabeth was stabbed on the shores
of Lake Geneva. The news was immediately dispatched to Vienna, and
on the following day, newspapers all over the monarchy reported her
death. In Trieste, the official Osservatore triestino (Triestine Observer)
dedicated a special issue to the event, offering fragmented and incom-
plete details of the assassination in front of the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in
Geneva and describing the shock in Vienna and Budapest.4 As in other
Habsburg cities, in Trieste public performances were canceled; theaters
closed; and black flags were draped on buildings. Fountains were cov-
ered in black, which the Osservatore interpreted as a spontaneous act
marking public mourning. The fountain in Piazza Ponterosso, a popu-
lar marketplace in the city center, was shrouded in black and a portrait
of Elisabeth was perched atop it, transforming the monument into a
3 Conflicts over statues and the Habsburg legacy are recurrent in the Adriatic
lands. Most recently, they flared up in September 2016 in Cormons (Gorizia) over
the relocation of a statue of Maximilian, the younger brother of Franz Joseph
also known as Maximilian I of Mexico. See Francesco Fain, “Massimiliano I, la
statua passa al Comune,” Il Piccolo, Sept. 2, 2016. Available at: http://ilpiccolo.
gelocal.it/trieste/cronaca/2016/09/02/news/massimiliano-i-la-statua-passa-
al-comune-1.14050357 (accessed January 23, 2017).
4 L’Osservatore Triestino, September 11, 1898, 1.
A Place for Sissi in Trieste 105
makeshift “tombstone.”5 In the following days, local organizations sent

letters of condolence to the governor, and the political and economic
elite expressed their sorrow in person. The local German-speaking
daily Triester Zeitung dedicated the first pages to Elisabeth’s death for
days and followed the events with great interest.6
Commemoration of the empress elicited expressions of collective
mourning but, in the highly tense political atmosphere of fin-de-siè-
cle Trieste, many chose not to participate in mourning rituals. Anti-
Habsburg oriented Italian nationalists and irredentists were not eager
to highlight aspects of public life associated with the monarchy’s rule,
and several institutions did not embellish their headquarters’ balconies
with black flags or banners. In the city characterized by ethnic confron-
tation and social inequality, the news from Geneva provoked demon-
strations resulting in acts of violence.
On the day after the assassination, Saturday September 11, several
hundred mourners gathered in a procession to offer their condolences
to Governor Hans Krekich-Strassoldo. What began as a peaceful gath-
ering soon took on a sinister anti-Italian tone. The crowd took offense
at a band playing a concert in the Public Garden and, seeing the per-
formance as an affront to the population in mourning, attacked the
performers and smashed their instruments. The windows of Italian
nationalist institutions including the daily Il Piccolo and the Società gin-
nastica triestina (Triestine Physical Fitness Association) were shattered,
and cafés known as irredentist hangouts including Chiozza, Stella
Polare, Municipio, and others were vandalized. Edinost, the Slovene
political association’s daily, and other outlets reported shouts of “Fora
gli Italiani” (“Out with the Italians”) and “Viva l’Austria” and “Živela
Avstrija” (“Long live Austria”) reflecting, it appeared, the overwhelm-
ing presence of Slovene-speaking Triestines among the demonstrators.
Edinost urged its readers not to take part in demonstrations, but ver-
bal taunts continued and rallies turned violent in the following days in
Trieste, Ljubljana/Laibach, Fiume/Rijeka/Reka and smaller towns of
the Adriatic Littoral.7 Incidents continued to erupt for at least ten days,
reported in every issue of Trieste’s newspapers, regardless of language
or political affiliation.
Newspapers presented the events through a nationalist lens, and
socialists and anti-monarchists took the Italian nationalist press’s side
5 L’Osservatore Triestino, September 14, 1898, 2. Cfr. Diana De Rosa, “Trieste, un

mare infinito,” in Sissi, Elisabetta d’Austria. L’impossibile altrove, ed. Pier Giorgio
Carizzoni, Diana De Rosa, and Fiorenza De Vecchi (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana
Editoriale, 2000).
6 Triester Zeitung, September 12, 1898, 1.
7 Edinost, September 12, 1898, 2; Il Piccolo, September 12, 1898, 1.
106 Sissi’s World
politicizing the demonstrations as anti-Italian. But, the riots were not

simple outbursts of ethnic violence in the city and in the Habsburg
monarchy; they were far more complex and multifaceted. For exam-
ple, the widely reported smashing of street lamps was a common
act of vandalism and had no particular national character. Over the
course of several days, persons of different political affiliations and
linguistic backgrounds were arrested.8 Police reports suggest that
rather than being a cause of the violence, ethnic tensions exacerbated
and legitimized it.9 Often social causes were at the root of violence.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, workers had flooded the
Habsburg Adriatic Littoral from the Kingdom of Italy causing dis-
content among local workers who felt they were being displaced by
the migrants and leading to considerable social unrest.10 In Nabres-
ina/Nabrežina’s mines, for example, where Italian workers were
employed, violence was rife and arrests of local workers had long
lasting repercussions.11
On Saturday September 17, the day of Elisabeth’s burial in Vienna,
authorities in Trieste gathered at the San Giusto Cathedral, and bells
rang throughout the region where city councils mourned the Empress
and condemned again the “atrocity” of her murder. Rather than remind
local populations of assassin Luciano Lucheni’s (Italian) ethnicity, local
outlets emphasized his political affiliation. Osservatore triestino con-
demned anarchism as “a criminal doctrine,” Edinost labeled the demon-
strators “anarchists,” and city councils from Pula/Pola to Monfalcone/
Tržič denounced the anarchist Lucheni as the “scum of society.”12 But,
this emphasis on political ideology could not capture the depth of the
discontent. The ethnic controversies and political polemics that sparked
violence on Elisabeth’s death re-emerged periodically over the course
of the following century in arguments and protests over the fate of the
statue raised in her memory.
8 A list of those arrested appears in Fulvio Furlan, ed., Società triestina di cultura:
atti delle conferenze: i monumenti a Sissi nel litorale austriaco, vol. 3 (Trieste: Edizioni
La Chiusa, 1996), 171–4.
9 Archivio di Stato di Trieste (AST), Direzione di polizia, Atti presidiali riservati
1814–1918, b. 233.
10 M. Cattaruzza, La formazione del proletariato urbano: Immigrati, operai di mestiere,
donne a Trieste dalla metà del secolo XIX alla prima guerra mondiale (Torino: Muso-
lini, 1979).
11 Edinost, September 15, 1898, 3. Cfr. Il Piccolo della sera, November 14, 1898, 1;
Edinost, November 14, 1898, 3.
12 L’Osservatore Triestino, September 16, 1898; Edinost, September 14, 1898; and AST,
I. R. Luogotenenza Del Litorale (1850–1918), Atti Presidiali, busta 205. Fascicolo
1/16–15.
The Statue in the Habsburg Port

Initial shock and grief at the empress’s assassination gave way to calls
for the construction of a monument to commemorate her life. Proposals
emanating from various groups captured the sentiment of the time, and
included references to Elisabeth’s iconic and mythic status. Her great
beauty, mystique, and humanity were touted, and she was revered as
a savior of oppressed peoples. Elisabeth’s reputation as a supporter of
Hungarian rights resonated with many in Trieste who, by the end of the
nineteenth century, sought to assert Italian rights in the empire. Trieste
was also associated with the empress’s desires to escape the confines of
court life and with her embarkation from the nearby Miramar/Miramare
castle for trips to Corfu and other destinations.13 These departures were
also linked to ideas of escape from her purported melancholy, depres-
sion, and taciturnity and grueling regimen of diet, exercise, and abstemi-
ousness in the Austrian or Germanic contexts. From Trieste, she escaped
to a sunnier, kinder, and more hospitable climate associated with life in
the Adriatic and Mediterranean lands.14
On March 2, 1900, the Workers Committee for the Erection of a
Monument to the Dead Empress was founded, headed by Arturo
Ramspott, a mechanic at the General Warehouse Authority, and with
a membership of 112 workers. The committee solicited donations for
the monument, but initial efforts proved disappointing, and by Decem-
ber, the campaign was expanded from Trieste to include Istria/Istra,
Görz/Gorizia/Gorica, and other parts of the monarchy.15 The enlarged
committee formed on December 2 (the anniversary of Franz Joseph’s
accession to the throne), relied on veterans’ leadership and the Mili-
tary Veterans Association, but still, it retained a working class charac-
ter that impeded its success. By the end of June 1904, the committee
represented by Johann Scocigorich and Franz Gulič had collected 60,400
crowns from the populace.16 The sum available had also increased by
the efforts of an Honorary Committee formed in 1902 and led by Baron
August Alber von Glanstätten. By 1906, sufficient sums had been col-
lected, including pledges from members of some of the wealthiest fam-
ilies in the region, and the Committee petitioned the City Council for
permission to erect the Elisabeth monument.17
13 The castle called Miramar in Elisabeth’s time is today referred to as Miramare,

likely to give the name a more Italian character.
14 On Elisabeth’s memory in tourist culture, see Jill Steward, “The Development of
Tourist Culture and the Formation of Social and Cultural Identities 1800–1914,
with Particular Reference to Central Europe,” PhD Diss., University of North-
umbria, 2008, 195–6.
15 AST, I. R. Luogotenenza Del Litorale (1850–1918), Atti Presidiali, 1906 PR 17.
16 Triester Zeitung, June 25, 1904, 2.
17 Laurence Cole, Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 245–6.
108 Sissi’s World
Intended as a “public mnemonic object,” the statue to Elisabeth aimed

to invoke memories of the beloved sovereign of the people.18 Triestine
workers held great affection for the Empress and the working class was
committed to building a monument to her memory, but the Empress had
not spent considerable time in the city and her rare visits had been brief.
No urban site was associated with her and so, the choice of a site became
contentious. The statue’s origin as a token of public mourning as well
as Elisabeth’s reputation as a protector of oppressed peoples prompted
suggestions of the San Giusto cathedral as the site. But detractors argued
that the church environs should be reserved for statuary of a religious
character. In addition, the San Giusto castle and hill were associated with
the city’s medieval autonomy construed by Italian nationalists as a local
stance against Habsburg domination. Italian nationalists also argued
that the space atop the hill, with its Roman ruins, should remain ded-
icated to the Roman settlement of Trieste. Piazza Lipsia (Piazza Attilio
Hortis today) in the city’s center was rejected as it was dedicated to edu-
cation and sciences rather than politics.19 Miramar Castle, on the city’s
outskirts, was linked to the royal family, but considered too remote and
inaccessible for the urban populous.
Despite some Italian nationalist members’ objections, the City Coun-
cil granted the petition and, on May 22, 1907, set aside land in front of
the railway station.20 The Piazza della Stazione site was a compromise.
Like sites surrounding train stations around the world, it represented
an area of interchange and movement, and a place frequented by peo-
ple from all walks of life. Inscribed as a Habsburg space due to its prox-
imity to the terminal station of the Austrian Südbahn, the piazza already
hosted a monument constructed in 1889 to celebrate Trieste’s 500 years
of dedication to the Habsburg monarchy.
Still, Italian nationalist council members objected to the statue as
indicative of pro-Habsburg sympathies and sought to stall the project.
The presence of statues of women embodying nation and state power
erected throughout turn of the century Europe heightened their anxiety.
18 The term “public mnemonic object” is borrowed from, Rachel Buchanan, “Why
Gandhi Doesn’t Belong at Wellington Railway Station,” Journal of Social History
44, no. 4 (2011): 1077.
19 Comune di Trieste (CT), Archivio generale, Verbali della delegazione munici-
pale di Trieste, 27 October 1905, no. 17178–05.
20 Osservatore Triestino, December 16, 1912. The Trieste City Council’s approval of
the Habsburg monument in front of the railway station contrasted with the deci-
sion in Trent in 1896 to approve Italian nationalists’ request for a statue of Dante
Alighieri by Florentine sculptor Cesare Zocchi. Trent city authorities maintained
that the statue was a tribute to the poet “of the remote past,” and Franz Joseph
sanctioned it as a marker of European culture and literature preserved in the
interests of all of the peoples of the monarchy.
Such figures as La Parisienne at the Paris Universal Exposition encapsu-

lated visions of the beautiful and modern woman as a figure of peace,
grace, and unity at the head of a fragmented state.21 These statues formed,
and continued to be part of “actively produced, programmed and sched-
uled” landscapes designed to assert or subvert political, cultural, and
social views.22 Sissi in Trieste reflected attempts to define the empress’s
role in Habsburg rule, her meaning in Trieste, and her legacy for the city.
Once the site in Piazza della Stazione was secured, an international
competition for the monument’s design was launched. In the field of
fifty-eight entries, the jury named three prize winners, with first place
going to Franz Seifert, a Viennese sculptor. But, in Trieste, in the atmos-
phere of competing loyalties, compromise seemed prudent, and the final
version of the monument differed significantly from Seifert’s design.
True to Seifert’s vision, the statue was cast in bronze, and Elisabetta
appeared as a maiden rather than an austere royal figure. But rather
than sitting on a pedestal as Seifert had imagined, and as was custom-
ary for royalty, Elisabeth stood. The jury tampered further with the
design adding marble slabs flanking the statue, a feature that had been
part of Triestine architects Teodoro Hummel and Francesco Schranz’s
design that had taken second place in the competition.23 This adapta-
tion recognized the work of local as opposed to Viennese artists, and it
represented a departure from traditional depictions of the Habsburgs
by placing the sovereign among, rather than above the people.
The marble reliefs to either side highlighted political agendas spe-
cific to the Adriatic provinces. The slab to the right side of the Empress
contained figures of the common people, with a youngster offering
Elisabeth a bouquet of flowers. The flower motif was typical of the
Jugendstil, and the bouquet symbolized the people’s affection.24 At the
same time, the iconography referred subtly to the empress’s reputation
as a royal “outsider” and champion of the oppressed peoples and the
empire’s ethnic minorities. On the left side slab, mythological images
represented the arts and culture, introducing a classical element (again
common to the Jugendstil) that spoke to Elisabeth’s reputation as a lover
of nature and a patron of the arts. Officially, the design was inspired
by the classical works housed at the Munich Glyptothek, the museum
21 Anne Dymond, “Embodying the Nation: Art, Fashion, and the Allegorical
Women at the 1900 Exposition Universelle,” RACAR: revue d’art canadienne/
Canadian Art Review 36, no. 2 (2011): 1.
22 Lorraine Dowler, Josephine Carubia, and Bonj Szczygiel, “Introduction: Gender
and Landscape: Renegotiating Morality and Space,” in Gender and Landscape:
Renegotiating the Moral Landscape, ed. Lorraine Dowler, Josephine Carubia, and
Bonj Szczygiel (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 7.
23 “Sissi: Il restauro annunciato: Storia di un monumento,” Il Piccolo, July 12, 1995.
24 Elena Bisjak Vinci, Il quaderno di Sissi (Trieste: Lint, 1997), 72.
110 Sissi’s World
commissioned in 1806 by Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria to hold the

Wittlesbach Prince Electors’ collection of classical statues and dedicated
to Athena as the patron of the visual arts.25 The allusion to the Glyp-
tothek highlighted the empress’s familial ties as Elisabeth’s mother
was Ludwig’s half-sister. It also could be read as an homage to Rome,
because the building inspired by Ludwig’s tour of Italy in 1804/1805
was designed to resemble a Rome bath. The multiplicity and complex-
ity of the associations of the bronze maiden Sissi statue with the fig-
ure of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war seen as a patron of the
oppressed, left considerable space for interpretation and reinterpreta-
tion of the Elisabeth statue’s purpose and meaning in the tense political
climate.
At the turn of the twentieth century, political monuments of the
royal Habsburgs proliferated in the lands of Central Europe.26 Those
erecting the monument saw it as a tribute to Elisabeth and the monar-
chy, but Italian nationalists saw it as a provocation, and so, Sissi entered
into the “war of monuments” that characterized the cultural landscape
of late-Habsburg Trieste.27 A request from the Committee for the Kaiser
Rudolf von Habsburg Memorial in Vienna that had reached Triestine
city officials in 1906 urged “support of all subjects of Austria” in the
erection of the monument because “no monument exists” in Trieste
and for “patriotic reasons” relating to the dynasty. It was a harbinger of
interventions to come.28 The plea demonstrated that Triestines shared
the imperial experience of patriotic monument movements in the mon-
archy, and it also reflected public frustration at the impediments to
erecting public monuments. While the Elisabeth monument in Pula, the
port city at Istria’s southern tip, standing against the backdrop of the
Roman arena had been dedicated in 1904, the plans for a monument
in Trieste were held hostage. In the monuments competition, “rival”
political figures dotted the landscape, including statues to such Ital-
ian national heroes as composer Giuseppe Verdi and artist Domenico
25 Osservatore Triestino, December 14, 1912. See also Gino Pavan, “Il monumento
all’imperatrice Elisabetta e un’altra sua memoria a Trieste,” Archeografo triestino
4, no. 58 (1998), 450–1.
26 The first statue designed specifically for political remembrance in a public space
was that of Don Juan of Austria, unveiled in Sicily in 1572 in honor of the hero
of the Battle of Lepanto. Nancy Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the
Bohemian Lands Became Czech (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007),
27.
27 See Diana De Rosa, “Il deposito della pietra: la lunga guerra dei monumenti
Trieste, 1915–2008,” Archeografo Triestino 4, no. 74 (2014): 457–85.
28 Comune di Trieste, Archivio generale, Mag. B. F1/8–5 1903–1907, busta 2445
(1/2–1 monumenti).
Rossetti and to local heroes like Giuseppe Caprin, a writer and member
of Garibaldi’s legions, and Giuseppe Rota, a musician and composer of
sacred music.29
In Trieste, the Elisabetta statue joined a host of public monuments
dedicated to the Habsburgs—including Maximilian, Franz Joseph, and
Charles VI. It inscribed a site of mourning on the landscape. But, at the
same time, it conjured images that extended far beyond the commem-
oration of the beloved consort of Franz Joseph and the tragedy of her
assassination at the hands of an anarchist. As Joseph II was honored
by statues in Bohemia for his success in uniting peasants and elites in
common cause, Elisabeth was venerated in the Adriatic lands for her
devotion to the common people as well as the commercial elite in the
Adriatic port city.30
Work on the Elisabetta statue took several years, and the committee
faced financial and political setbacks but, finally, on December 15, 1912,
the monument was dedicated. At its completion, the bronze statue, the
marble slabs, and the base made from local marble stood more than 5
meters high and 11 meters wide (Figure 5.1). Although the City Council
had provided the public funds necessary to commence work, the sums
collected from private sources through the workers’ initiative were crit-
ical to the monument’s completion. Despite the workers’ considerable
investment, their efforts were not recognized at the dedication ceremony
in December 1912, which was a formal, government affair at which the
populous merely looked on. Citizens gathered to see the Archduke
Franz Salvator, the Emperor’s son-in-law and the guest of honor, wel-
comed by the highest municipal and regional authorities. In the atmos-
phere of simmering political conflicts in Trieste, the choice of Franz
Salvator was an astute one. Archduke of the House of Habsburg-Lor-
raine, Franz Salvator was the son of Archduke Karl Salvator, Prince of
Tuscany and Maria Immaculata, Princess of the Two Sicilies. A descend-
ent of the Habsburg, Bourbon, and Tuscan royal families and married to
the emperor’s daughter Gisela, he was undeniably royal and Habsburg
but was certainly associated also with the Italian peninsula. Represent-
atives of many city associations laid wreaths at the statue’s base, and
the Archbishop Andrej Karlin celebrated mass in front of the monu-
ment. President of the statue committee Count Emilio Alberti de Poja
29 Busts of Caprin and Rota were placed in the Public Garden in 1905 and 1912,
respectively. On the statuary in Trieste’s Muzio de Tommasini Public Garden, see
http://www.irsml.eu/Giardino_Pubblico/Giardino_pubblico.pdf (accessed
January 23, 2017). Cfr. B. Klabjan, “Nacionalizacija kulturne krajine severnega
Jadrana na začetku 20. stoletja: primer Verdijevega spomenika v Trstu,” Acta
Histriae 23, no. 1(2015): 113–30.
30 On Joseph II, see Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints, 45ff.
112 Sissi’s World
Figure 5.1 Civici Musei di Trieste, “Elisabetta” in 1912.
symbolically donated the memorial to the city, represented by Mayor

Alfonso Valerio.31
From December 1912 to the end of World War I, Elisabetta found a
home in Piazza della Stazione. But, in November 1918, with the col-
lapse of the Monarchy and Italian occupation of the city, the statue’s
future became uncertain. Many Habsburg monuments and emblems
were attacked and destroyed in the wave of Italian ultra-nationalism
that swept Trieste at the end of the war. The Elisabetta statue survived
the initial nationalist frenzy, but not public notice. In 1919, the Italian
governor of occupied Trieste asked the city council for a proposal to
deal with the Habsburg monuments remaining in the city. The commit-
tee recognized Elisabetta’s sentimental and historical value, but council
members nonetheless suggested that the statue be dismantled. In the
post-World War I political environment saturated with Italian nation-
alism and irredentist sentiment, they claimed the statue was erected
not by “those who wished to remember the victim of an insane assas-
sin,” but by the “anti-Italian faction” in the city that had “hated” and
“wished to provoke” Italy.32
31 Edinost, December 16, 1912, 2; Il Piccolo, December 16, 1912, 2.

32 De Rosa, “Il deposito della pietra,” 464–6.
The city officials were not unaware, however, of the political pas-
sions that might be stirred by the monument’s removal, particularly the
disturbance it might cause among the common people who had con-
tributed to the statue’s erection. Perhaps out of respect for the empress
and in recognition of the city’s investment, the council recommended
consigning Elisabetta, minus her base and slabs, to the church of San
Vincenzo de Paoli, a recently formed parish in the Chiadino neighbor-
hood of the city. But, some complained that the church’s location was
too remote, and others objected to placing the statue lacking a religious
character in a church. City council leaders then proposed the Lapidario
di San Giusto, a museum holding ancient artifacts. But nationalists
objected, arguing that the Habsburg relics would “taint” the Italian
artifacts of Roman origin. The Villa Basevi slated to house the new
Museum of the Risorgimento was suggested, but it was conceived as
an Italian national museum. So the park at Miramar Castle was settled
on. Between the end of January and the beginning of February 1921
and just before Trieste’s formal annexation to Italy, the statue was dis-
mantled and transported to a city storage facility in the castle’s former
stables.33
The removal of Habsburg monuments including the empress and
Ferdinand Maximilian monuments signaled the ascendancy of pro-Ital-
ian and irredentist factions, a development that would bring radical
changes to the local population in the interwar years.34 Under the Fascist
government, the city, its environs, and its people were “made Italian,”
and a public works project paved over the statue’s original site adjacent
to the train station for a bus and gas station.35 However, public uncer-
tainty and ambivalence persisted with respect to monuments recall-
ing the city’s Habsburg legacy. As Mayor Giorgio Pitacco explained in
1932, the statue of the empress of a former enemy was inappropriate
for public view. But Elisabetta, he noted, would remain in storage in
the building adjacent to Miramare park out of respect for the public’s
investment in the monument’s construction.36 Statues dedicated to
Habsburg emperors Charles VI and Leopold I were the subject of public
33 De Rosa, “Il deposito della pietra,” 462–8.

34 Glenda Sluga, The Problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav Border: Difference,
Identity, and Sovereignty in Twentieth-Century Europe (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2001), 55. The Maximilian statue dates to the 1870s. Made
by Johann Schilling, winner of a public contest sponsored by Baron Pasquale
Revoltella in commemoration of the Archduke killed in Mexico, the work was
unveiled in April 1875.
35 Maura Hametz, Making Trieste Italian 1918–1954 (London: Royal Historical Soci-
ety, 2005).
36 Pier Paolo Sancin, ed., Trieste: Una città senza monumenti (Trieste: Edizioni Luglio,
2009), 84.
114 Sissi’s World
debate in the press. In view of their perceived economic and commer-

cial importance associated with the port, both remained in prominent
posts, in the city’s central square and in the plaza in front of the stock
exchange, respectively.
Cold War Hibernation

At the end of World War II Anglo-American and Yugoslav forces occu-
pied the region and the city was ruled by an Allied Military Govern-
ment (AMG) as Zone A of the Free Territory of Trieste until 1954. The
AMG established a headquarters at Miramare Castle and requested use
of the castle’s warehouse space for storage of reconstruction materiel.
This request opened discussions on the fate of the city’s monuments
and treasures housed there. The Società Minerva (Minerva Society), a
group of local intellectuals, proposed returning the warehoused Maxi-
milian statue to its prewar post in Piazza Venezia (prior to World War I
Piazza Giuseppina in honor of Joseph II).37 Maximilian’s possible return
to public view prompted suggestions for Elisabetta’s return as well.
While those supporting an independent Trieste favored the proposal,
Italian nationalists asserted that returning Sissi to public view would
undermine Trieste’s image as an Italian city, a position central to AMG
and Italian policy for post-World War II Europe. But nationalist objec-
tions were not based solely on concerns for Italian hegemony. They
were amplified by the fresh memory of German aggression. Elisabeth
not only represented the long reign of the Habsburgs, she hailed from
Bavaria. By 1951, fed up with the bickering, the AMG moved several
large pieces, including the statue of Elisabeth, out of the storage facility
and to an open air space behind the former stables on the Miramare
property.38 This temporary resting place became Elisabetta’s home for
several decades.
In 1954, the AMG negotiated a territorial agreement to split the Free
Territory, assigning Zone A including the city of Trieste and its environs
to Italy and giving the remainder Zone B including Istria to Yugosla-
via. The settlement cleared the way for Maximilian’s statue to return to
view in the Miramare gardens in 1961. The failed Emperor of Mexico,
destined never to live in his Miramare castle, was consigned to history,
a romantic and tragic reminder of Habsburg failure and hubris. But, the
Empress Elisabeth remained an ambiguous figure. Beloved by many,
she was an international icon; her image grabbed public attention, she
inspired nostalgia, and she represented the glory of the monarchy and
imperial power. Thus, she remained a controversial figure in post-World
37 Biblioteca civica, Trieste, Società di Minerva Trieste. Verbali delle sedute ordi-
narie dei soci per l’anno accademico 1951–1952, no. 276, June 7, 1952.
38 De Rosa, “Il deposito della pietra,” 500.
War II Trieste and, as a result, her statue remained behind the stables at
Miramare.
In 1972, the weekly Il Meridiano di Trieste’s “Vecchia Trieste” (Old
Trieste) column featured the Elisabetta statue in a spread bearing the
simple title “Sistemare Sissi” (“Fix Sissi”). The writer Ruggero Pozzar’s
pictures, taken “at risk to a friend’s confidence,” showed Elisabetta and
other civic monuments neglected and open to the elements outside the
art restoration studio on Miramare’s grounds. Insisting that the myth of
the Habsburgs was “never more alive,” Pozzar asked the city to restore
the statue, suggesting that it could provide a summer tourist attraction
“for those who, if for nothing else, know her because of Romy Sch-
neider, without [necessarily] recognizing her kinship with Maximilian
or associations with Miramare.”39 Pozzar’s article captured the spirit
of the period and the increasing interest in and movement for resto-
ration of historic artistic works and statuary of the city.40 It recognized
the increasing opportunities to capitalize on Elisabeth’s public appeal
across Europe and particularly in the German-speaking world, a popu-
larity spurred by the Sissi trilogy (1955–1957) starring Romy Schneider
and her reprise of the empress role in Ludwig, released in 1973. Still,
Elisabetta remained hidden in the castle gardens.
In 1975, the Osimo Accords made the 1954 territorial arrangement
permanent, assuring Trieste’s future in Italy. Some in the city hoped to
benefit from the city’s role as a western bulwark on the edge of social-
ist Europe but, by that time, neutral and non-aligned Yugoslavia had
emerged, and the world’s gaze had turned to Cold War hotspots else-
where. Trieste’s economic role in Italy remained uncertain, and local
trade was heavily reliant on cross-border interactions in the Adriatic
provinces, areas that had been linked in the Habsburg network in the
Adriatic Littoral. Possibilities for local autonomy and interregional
cooperation became a topic of discussion, and the popular movement
Lista per Trieste, initially a transnational movement supporting local
autonomy, gained local political attention.41 But, even the growing
transnational sentiment failed to rescue the Sissi statue.
39 Ruggero Pozzar, “Vecchia Trieste: Sistemare Sissi,” Il Meridiano di Trieste, Octo-

ber 27/29, 1972, 4.
40 The following week, the “Vecchia Trieste” column focused on the replacement of
Mikeze e Jakeze, the two bronze moors ringing the bell atop the City Hall build-
ing in Trieste’s Piazza Unità. The “twins,” subject to the elements since 1873
when they were placed in the clock tower, were in danger of falling. “Mikeze e
Jakeze: Nuovi a cento anni,” Il Meridiano di Trieste, November 3/5, 1972, 14.
41 Piero Purini, “Una conseguenza degli accordi di Osimo: la nascita della Lista
per Trieste,” in Osimska meja. Jugoslovansko-italijanska pogajanja in razmejitev leta
1975, ed. Jože Pirjevec, Borut Klabjan, and Gorazd Bajc (Koper: Annales, 2006).
The movement eventually settled in the nationalist and conservative political
sphere.
116 Sissi’s World
In 1977, Bad Ischl (in Austria) sought to purchase the bronze figure
of the maiden Sissi for a monument to be raised on the site of Elis-
abeth and Franz Joseph’s first encounter. Triestine officials refused the
town’s request.42 Despite reluctance to return Elisabetta to public view
in Trieste, the city remained attached to the statue, and it was attracting
attention behind the scenes. In 1982, a photomontage in the “Giornale
di Trieste” section of Il Piccolo, the major Triestine daily, speculated on
Sissi’s “possible future.” The paper reported that several proposals for
Sissi’s return to Piazza Libertà were under consideration, including one
by from Honorary Superintendent of Fine Arts Fiorello de Farolfi, who
proposed restoring the statue and marble slabs and returning Elisabetta
to a site in front of the railway station, just a short distance from where
she had originally stood.43
These initial proposals came to naught, but by 1985, local benefactors
of Trieste’s medical school sympathetic to Elisabetta’s plight broached
the matter with provincial tourism president Bruno Cavicchioli proffer-
ing yet another proposal to return the statue to the square in front of the
railway station. They hoped that provincial leaders might better rec-
ognize the statue’s potential as an international tourist attraction and
be willing to circumvent opposition that had stymied civic leaders in
Trieste. Perhaps motivated by this proposal, in 1987, provincial author-
ities entered into a ninety-nine year renewable lease with city officials
for possession of the figure of Elisabetta and the flanking marble slabs.44
City leaders were only too happy to be rid of the “hot potato,” the
Elisabetta statue that had been a contentious subject of debate under
successive city administrations.45 While they recognized the depth of
public affection for the empress, they feared being held responsible for
“resuscitating an enemy monument.”46
Optimists hoped that under provincial authority Sissi might “return
to the sun” on the Miramare Castle grounds as early as the summer
of 1988. But provincial leaders had no better luck than civic leaders.
They believed Miramare was a fitting and appropriate site for the trib-
ute to the Habsburg empress. But they proved unable to overcome
the objections of those who continued to demand Elisabetta’s return
to Piazza della Libertà, a site in the city’s center accessible to all of
Trieste’s inhabitants and befitting her memory as a champion of the
oppressed peoples.47 Unable to decide on the proper locale, in May
42 Vinci, Il quaderno di Sissi, 73.

43 “Un futuribile ritorno al passato,” Il Piccolo, September 2, 1982.
44 Sancin, Trieste: Una città senza monumenti, 86–7.
45 Alessia Rosolen, “Mitteleuropa, quale nostalgia?: Sissi, la maledetta, anche da
morta,” Il Meridiano di Trieste Oggi 267, no. 5 (1996): 10.
46 Sancin, Trieste: Una città senza monumenti, 86–7.
47 “E Sissi ritorna al sole,” Il Piccolo, November 29, 1987.
1990, the Provincial Council tabled consideration of the Elisabetta mat-

ter until after the upcoming elections.48
New Central Europe

By the early 1990s, the re-emergence of Central Europe at the end of the
Cold War and the establishment of the independent republics of Slove-
nia and Croatia considerably altered the political environment remind-
ing Triestines that, as Doreen Massey has noted, the identity of place
is “unfixed, open and provisional,” and that public monuments and
landscapes were open to re-evaluation as “particular claimant groups”
struggled to assert their agendas at the “particular moment/location in
time-space.”49 In Trieste, clashing “moral agendas,” the shifting sands
of political discourse, and competing political interests played out in
bitter arguments over whether or not to return Elisabetta to public view.
The paradoxes of the empress’s life and the myths surrounding her
memory served as fodder for argument over where the statue should
be situated.50
In 1991, “Mitteleuropa,” an association representing Central Euro-
pean perspectives, collected 5,000 signatures in support of Elisabetta’s
restoration and relocation. Public speculation and discussions contin-
ued over the next few years, with the proposal to return the statue to
Piazza Libertà gaining momentum. By 1995, the statute’s fate became
a subject of public drama. While many saw Habsburg monuments
simply as vestiges of the monarchy’s rule and “as backdrops in daily
life,” as scholars like Janice Monk have noted, their erection or resur-
rection had a didactic aim to “instruct society in core values and herit-
age.”51 Debates over Elisabetta reflected the struggle for power in Italy
between the Left and Right and the local controversies on the Right
between conservative nationalists and their more centrist opponents
intent on re-crafting the political memory of the city. They also touched
on conflicting public sentiments linked to the memory of the empress,
the Germans, or the Habsburg monarchy.
The potential for consumer and tourism opportunities offered by
links to contemporary Austria and Central European states also fig-
ured into the equation. Calls to restore the statue echoed, at least in
part, sponsorship of other Habsburg-inspired initiatives including, for
48 Sancin, Trieste: Una città senza monumenti, 87.

49 Doreen Massey discusses the dynamic nature of space with respect to landscape
and political agendas. See Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 169–70.
50 On moral agendas, see Dowler, Carubia, and Szczygiel, “Introduction,” 7.
51 Janice Monk, “Gender in the Landscape: Expressions of Power and Meaning,”
in Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography, ed. Kay Anderson and Fay Gale
(Melbourne, Au.: Longman Cheshire, 1992), 124.
118 Sissi’s World
example, an exhibition entitled “Sissi, regina d’Ungheria” (Sissi, queen

of Hungary) held at the Stazione Marittima (Maritime Station) Hall
from July 1 to August 15, 1995.52 This emphasis on Elisabeth’s Hungar-
ian associations accorded with views of her as a champion of oppressed
peoples throughout the Empire. On June 30, 1995, Il Piccolo carried an
article announcing the “likely” restoration of Elisabetta, and on July 12,
historian Furio Furlan published a short account of the statue’s history,
highlighting its placement in front of the railway station.53 In Decem-
ber 1995, authorities announced their intention to restore the statue
and began considering proposals submitted by various parties. Plans
unveiled in late 1995 and early 1996 sparked reaction and arguments
that bore striking resemblance to debates over the statue’s dedication
eight decades earlier, but with some updated twists.
Many continued to argue that Miramare was more suited to the dig-
nified display of the monument, providing natural and artistic beauty
in a spacious park “where visitors could admire her in an environment
consonant with her rank as princess and then empress.”54 Voices from
the Right, reminiscent of those engaged in turn-of-the-century nation-
alist arguments in the “war of monuments,” argued the need to give
equal “space” in Trieste to Italian figures and called for the “rescue” of
the statue of irredentist martyr Guglielmo Oberdan and his return to
the “square named for him.”55
In January 1996, Trieste’s Vice-Mayor Roberto Damiani’s frustration
with the Elisabetta argument spilled over in an editorial in Il Piccolo ask-
ing if in Trieste “there are environments, fields, sectors, or even single
projects in which the civility necessary to confront legitimate diverse
opinions will not degenerate into polemics?” With a hint of hyperbole
and with conscious reference to Trieste’s Italian literary culture that
blossomed under the Habsburgs, he reminded Triestines of the city’s
evolution from a “miserable village of fisherman” (a phrase attributed
to the Triestine writer Scipio Slataper) with 4,000 inhabitants to “the
second ranked port of the Mediterranean.” He implored Triestines
to see refurbishment of the monument as an attempt to “harmonize
the pages of the past” and as “an inducement to respect with regard
52 A copy of the exhibition catalog is held in Trieste, Civici Musei di Storia ed Arte,
Esposizione Misc. 183–6.
53 “Sissi: Il restauro annunciato,” Il Piccolo.
54 “Il posto giusto,” Il Piccolo, July 12, 1995, and “Il posto di Elisabetta,” Il Piccolo,
October 10, 1996.
55 “E sulla statua di Sissi monta la polemica,” Il Piccolo, January 2, 1996. Guglielmo
Oberdan (k) was executed in 1882 by the Habsburg authorities for attempting to
assassinate the emperor. Roberto Menia, a representative of the Alleanza Nazi-
onale party from 1995 to 2009, who served for more than ten years as a city
councilman in Trieste, led the call for the “rescue” of the Oberdan statue.
to identity.” He invoked the memory of World War I volunteer and

Gold Medal winner writer Giani Stuparich, who described the city as a
“crucible of civilization … in terms of tolerance, peaceful cohabitation,
and work among people of diverse faiths, languages, customs, and tra-
ditions.” He noted that Oberdan’s statue had never stood in Oberdan
Square and, referring to the Italian nationalizing project of the interwar
years, suggested that Oberdan had not been “swept away” from his
post by “avenging nationalist fears.”56
Members of the Christian Democratic center Bruno Marini and Mau-
rizio Marini asked how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, Trieste
could remain divided by “futile and specious polemics regarding the
placement of the statues of Sissi and Oberdan.” Denying any symbolic
importance to the act of replacing Sissi and referring to her personal
appeal and reputation, they argued, “The Italian identity of Trieste cer-
tainly does not waver under the weight of the beautiful Sissi.”57 Vice-
Mayor Damiani summed up, “So Sissi will be replaced … to restore to
dignity a site now degraded, to pay homage to the historical architec-
tural identity of Trieste, and to refute the ill-omened logic of those—
evidently dubious of this intention—who would like to defend it from
phantoms that they themselves have sustained, to justify their own out-
moded political position.”58
Damiani not only insulted Elisabeth’s detractors for chasing phan-
toms, he went further and invoked darker moments of conflict and of
World War II, striking a raw nerve in the public that remembered the
violence, ethnic enmities, and dislocation of war and was struggling still
in the mid-1990s to come to terms with recent atrocities in the nearby
territories of the former Yugoslavia. Aware of the depth of public senti-
ment surrounding the figure of Sissi, Damiani warned against elevating
the debate over the statue to a fever pitch like that which surrounded
crimes of the foibe (deep limestone pits in the Carso countryside remem-
bered bitterly as the grave of scores of victims murdered in the political
vengeance and in ethnic and political conflicts during the World War II
era) or that which referred to the atrocities of the Risiera di San Sabba
(the Nazi concentration camp in Trieste where political prisoners were
executed).59
In this atmosphere of public disquiet, plans to fix and systematize
Sissi moved forward, and in April 1996, the city council chose archi-
tect Ennio Cervi’s proposal (from a field of thirteen) to refurbish the
monument.60 A letter published in May 1996 labeled the attempt
56 Roberto Damiani, “Sissi è ormai storia,” Il Piccolo, January 3, 1996.

57 “E sulla statua di Sissi monta la polemica,” Il Piccolo.
58 Damiani, “Sissi è ormai storia.”
59 Damiani, “Sissi è ormai storia.”
60 Sancin, Trieste: Una città senza monumenti, 88.
120 Sissi’s World
to “hide” Sissi as shameful in light of the “destruction wrought by the

Alpini on Slovenia, Croatian, and Greek villages, not to mention [the
subject of] Priebke.”61 The reference reflected the nationalistic hyper-
bole swirling in the city. The mention of the crimes of the Alpini (elite
Italian mountain brigades) revered in Italy and the reference to the trial
of Erich Priebke (a member of Waffen SS accused of war crimes, spe-
cifically participation in the March 1944 Ardeatine caves massacre in
Rome, whose trial was underway in Rome) represented an attempt to
elide the historical crimes of Italians with those of others and to charge
those objecting to Elisabetta’s return with historical hypocrisy.
Some in the city invoked the distant memory of World War I, hop-
ing that allusion to the more remote conflict and its settlement might
allow cooler heads to prevail. “The heads of state of Austria and Italy
(in alphabetical order) officially reconciled on the banks of the Isonzo.
Can’t we also do that?” asked Roberto Todero, a local Habsburg mili-
tary expert.62 But, by May, the controversy had degenerated further to
“insupportable bickering in the manner of old women” over “Sissi yes
and Sissi no.” Yet, in his denouncement of the public squabbling, Tri-
estine Paolo Vatovec merely entered the fray expressing his own rever-
ence for the Empress in his indignation at the informality with which
the Empress was being discussed. He took Triestines to task for using
the nickname “Sissi,” a “term of domestic endearment.” The empress
should not be referred to “as if she were a sister.”63 Calling her “Sissi”
was akin to referring to Victor Emmanuel II as “Toio” or Umberto as
“Berto,” he scolded.64
By June, the argument over Sissi had become a drama in and of itself.
The noted Triestine Egyptologist Claudia Dolzani denounced the local
feud as a “nauseating soap opera poorly understood even by those
who produce it.”65 And, while at the height of the polemics, elements
of the “soap opera” might have been misunderstood, the arguments
reflected deep emotional attachments to visions of the empress. They
varied from spats over the particularities of the statue’s political context
to broader, less concise clashes between modern, emancipationist, and
feminist visions and traditionalist, nostalgic, and personal views.
An article in Il Meridiano di Trieste in July 1996 captured Italian
nationalists’ bitterness at the thought of the statue’s imminent return
61 Bruno Berfolja, “Nasconderla è un’infamia,” Il Piccolo, May 15, 1996. After the
Nazi defeat, Priebke fled to Argentina. In 1995, he was extradited to Italy, and in
1996 he was convicted.
62 Roberto Todero, “Piazza libertà/la statua di Sissi: Tassello di una memoria stor-
ica smarrita,” Il Piccolo, February 16, 1996.
63 Paolo Vatocev, “Insopportabile battibecco da troncare,” Il Piccolo, May 15, 1996.
64 Bruno Berfolja, “Nasconderla è un’infamia,” Il Piccolo, May 15, 1996.
65 Claudia Dolzani, “Stucchevole telenovela,” Il Piccolo, June 22, 1996.
to public view. Calling the idea of Mitteleuropa (construed as an opti-

mistic sentiment for revived Central Europe) “a deceit and an illusion,”
Alessia Rosolen, a journalist and Right-leaning politician, suggested
that the myth of Mitteleuropa had become a “snobby refrain,” and she
dismissed it as trendy and “a little chic.”66 She sought to discredit the
nostalgic vision of the Habsburg Empire recalled in Mitteleuropa initia-
tives of the 1990s, calling the projects “nothing but the illuminated win-
dow of a somewhat suspect funeral home that peddles [the dead] for
living and sells Central European cadavers.”67 And implying that Cen-
tral European ideas were without merit, she charged that the consider-
able energies spent in trying to “find citizenship” (or a home) for Sissi’s
statue, a memento of a past world, were wasted. What was most impor-
tant, she argued was that the ghost of Sissi, “cursed, even in death,” be
laid to rest. As a metaphor for the defunct empire and the imagined
golden age of the turn of the century, Elisabetta should be forgotten to
allow Trieste to “live in the present without relying on the past.”68
Polemics notwithstanding, the City Council did move to return Elis-
abetta to Piazza Libertà, situating the statue a short distance from its
original spot, and placing it on the site where the monument commem-
orating the 500th anniversary of Trieste’s dedication to the Habsburg
monarchy (destroyed in the wake of World War I) once stood. At the
“new” Elisabetta monument’s unveiling in October 1997, dignitaries
focused on the Elisabetta as a symbol of healing. Masimiliano Coos,
local representative of the Italia Federale party, noted, “The inaugu-
ral ceremony brought attention to the multi-millennial history of the
city, from its pre-Roman origins … to interrupt the negative parenthe-
sis of the past decades and open a new phase of growth and prosper-
ity.” Coos suggested that the monument allowed the city to display its
unique relationship to Mitteleuropa “a place and conception of which
the city has become emblematic.”69 Chastising those who “pretend to be
scandalized and indignant over the statue,” Dario Balzec referred to the
ambiguities of sentiment evidenced by all figures of the past. “[I]f this
act is a sign of anti-italianità,” he charged, “it is necessary to have the
courage to call Giosuè Carducci [the nationalist poet] anti-Italian, who
… is ‘guilty’ of having composed an elegy after the funeral of Elisabeth
66 Rosolen served as a city councilwoman in Trieste from 1998 to 2008 and from
2011 to the present. She was also a member of the provincial council from 2001
to 2002 and was re-elected to that post in 2006.
67 Rosolen, “Mitteleuropa, quale nostalgia?” 8–9.
68 Rosolen, “Mitteleuropa, quale nostalgia?” 10.
69 “Numerose e di segno diverso le reazioni suscitate dalla ricollazione della statua
dell’imperatrice: Ancora Sissi: un simbolo fra passato e futuro,” Il Piccolo, Octo-
ber 11, 1997. Italia Federale was a centrist political movement of liberal demo-
cratic leanings founded in 1996; it joined Rinnovamento Italia in 1998.
122 Sissi’s World
ninety-nine years ago.”70 Returning the statue of the empress, which

was erected as a symbol of unified mourning in the city, was a “neces-
sity to give the city back its past, free of the divisions and wounds of
history.”71 In a further gesture of support and an homage to Sissi’s apo-
litical appeal as a fashion and style icon, an exhibit called “Sissi’s Fans
from the Aldo Dente Collection” was mounted at Trieste’s Museo Sar-
torio in October and November 1997.
Speakers at the statue’s rededication assured Triestines that its
re-positioning was not a display of “revanchism linked to the belle épo-
que.” “Only a cretin would exploit the Sissi statue’s presence today as
a political strategy aiming to reconstruct an Austria-Hungary already
consigned to the attic of memory,” the politician Coos contended. The
statue was a bridge between the past and the future of the Adriatic
city.72 Focus on the figure of the Habsburg empress conjured visions
of the city’s golden era prior to World War I and elided the Habsburg
past with hopes for the Central European present, while conveniently
ignoring the intervening decades of fascist oppression, Nazi persecu-
tion, wartime atrocities, and Cold War tensions and animosities. Sissi’s
return to a place of honor in Trieste symbolized Triestines’ and Ital-
ians’ optimism with respect to participation and leadership in the new
Europe.
A forum in Il Piccolo indicated, however, that Elisabetta was by no
means a benign symbol of Central Europe and that the Habsburgs
had not been consigned to the attic of memory. The Sissi monument
had local, national, and global meanings in the “memorial landscape”
of the city.73 While some read the empress’s presence as a symbol of
multi-ethnic community and economic prosperity associated with the
Habsburg monarchy, others saw Elisabeth’s resurrection as evidence
of revanchism and an attempt to undermine Italy’s claims to territory,
property, and public rights in the Adriatic borderlands, contested with
the rise of Slovenia and Croatia as independent European states. Coun-
cilman Menia continued to insist that a statue of Oberdan be erected to
counterbalance the “philo-Austrian symbols” in Trieste.74 Enrico Maz-
zoli, representing the autonomist “Mitteleuropa Movement” (of monar-
chical sentiments), suggested that Elisabetta’s return demonstrated that
the city was “capable of viewing its Austrian past without trauma” and
praised the city’s administrators for keeping the discourse within the
70 “Numerose e di segno diverso,” Il Piccolo.

71 “Interrogazione di Menia al sindaco: dopo Sissi il commune rimetta al suo posto
il monumento a Oberdan,” Il Piccolo, October 25, 1997.
72 “Numerose e di segno diverso,” Il Piccolo.
73 Rachel Buchanan explores the local, national, and global aspects of memorial
landscapes in her article “Why Gandhi Doesn’t Belong,” 1089.
74 “Interrogazione di Menia al sindaco,” Il Piccolo.
bounds of “legitimate debate” and “civil argument.” But, he continued

on with the provocative comment that if the city were to restore the
monument to Oberdan, then other statues, like the Maximilian mon-
ument in Piazza Venezia, should be put back in their places as well.75
Sissi at the Millennium

“The replacement of the monument to Empress Elisabeth of Austria
in Piazza Libertà has without doubt changed something in Trieste,”
commented Enrico Mazzoli.76 It offered “opportunities for social inter-
action and reflection.”77 It became a locus of attention in Trieste’s mil-
lennial celebrations, tied to the memory of the Empress Elisabeth. An
exhibit entitled “Elisabetta d’Austria, L’impossibile altrove” (Elisabeth
of Austria, The Impossible Elsewhere), from July 24, 2000 to January 7,
2001, housed in the former stables at Miramare Castle (behind which
the Elisabetta statue had once stood neglected) aimed at an interna-
tional audience of “women of all ages, families with school age chil-
dren, scholars, seasonal tourists, and cultured people with historical
interests” and to encourage tourists to explore the empress’s ties to the
Adriatic port.78
Here, the Empress was presented as a complex and intriguing
woman, an independent spirit well loved by the people, but endlessly
seeking to escape her public role. Originally proposed for a site in
Rome, the Sissi exhibition was mounted instead at Miramare, because,
purportedly, Elisabeth loved the castle and its gardens, which inspired
the construction of her Achilleion castle on Corfu. Siting the exhibit at
Miramare paid tribute to “the strongest natural relations” between Italy
and Austria, ironically with the empress’s flight from court becoming
the bridge to surrounding lands.79 Günter Düriegl, Director of the State
Museum of Vienna, picked up on the theme of Trieste as the empress’s
entryway into the lands of the Mediterranean, describing the city as “a
horizon of freedom” and a place of “liberation,” where the Empress
75 Enrico Mazzoli, “Da ricollocare anche le statue di Oberdan di Massimiliano,” Il

Piccolo, November 6, 1997.
76 Mazzoli, “Da ricollocare anche le statue di Oberdan di Massimiliano.”
77 Claudine Isé, Vanishing Point (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for Arts, 2005), 13.
78 Feriani, Gabriella, Comune di Trieste, Archivio generale, Piano di marketing
urbano collegamento tematico tra la mostra evento “Sissi, Elisabetta d’Austria: l’impos-
sibile altrove” e il mondo imprenditoriale triestino, Corso post laurea di formazione
di Guide didattiche per i musei e per l’area archeologica, PIC Urban Progetto
Tergeste, ENAIP Friuli Venezia Giulia, Università degli studi di Trieste, June
2000.
79 Günter Birbaum, “Trieste: un flair,” in Sissi, Elisabetta d’Austria, eds. Pier Giorgio
Carizzoni, Diana De Rosa, and Fiorenza De Vecchi, et al. (Cinisello Balsamo:
Silvana, 2000), 8–9.
124 Sissi’s World
“reached the sea, leaving behind the cold Alps and anticipating the sun
and light.”80
Mayor of Trieste and coffee magnate Riccardo Illy rejected such
romantic depictions of Trieste’s tie to Elisabeth. A strong supporter of
regional autonomy and development, Illy promoted the Elisabeth com-
memoration as a tribute to “the contemporary physiognomy of an Ital-
ian city singing out in full force intending to realize a Europe without
borders or psychological barriers.”81 This reference went hand in hand
with Triestine celebrations of the European Union in 2000 in the city’s
central square Piazza Unità. In the seaside piazza another feminine fig-
ure, Lady Trieste, astride a bull and bearing a lance topped with the
city’s halberd emblem, with a halo of yellow stars representing each
of the countries of the European Community and riding toward the
Adriatic Sea, appeared in a mural painted tile by tile by volunteers and
passers-by on the pavement of the square. The parallels between the
depiction of Lady Trieste in the Piazza Unità mural (74 by 144 meters,
or approximately 10.4 meters square) and the Elisabetta statue in
Piazza Libertà were unmistakable; the women inscribed Trieste’s, and
by extension Italy’s, ambitions in re-emerging Central Europe on a dis-
tinctly Italian landscape. Both images of women occupied urban spaces
ascribed, according to their names Piazza Libertà and Piazza Unità, to
the modern Italian state and the celebration of Trieste’s annexation to
Italy.
The gap between Illy’s readings and international perceptions of
Sissi’s role in Trieste was most evident in Austrian Ambassador to
Italy Günter Birbaum’s suggestion that the 2000 exhibition offered the
opportunity to remember Elisabeth’s historical context and “to conserve
and reinforce her real identity.” For Birbaum, this real identity was the
“very particular perspective of an Empress who helped little from the
institutional aspects of her own position, but who touched and truly
fascinated her contemporaries.” She called to mind a Habsburg empire,
governed by an organized administration, in which the various nation-
alities lived together in harmony, and in which a highly developed state
assured opportunities for development to the population. “Our time,
that recognizes individuality as a style of living, must find the atypical
80 Günter Düriegl, “Orizzonti di libertà,” in Sissi, Elisabetta d’Austria, eds. Pier

Giorgio Carizzoni, Diana De Rosa, and Fiorenza De Vecchi, et al. (Cinisello Bal-
samo: Silvana, 2000), 10.
81 Riccardo Illy, “Un’ Europa senza confini,” in Sissi, Elisabetta d’Austria, eds. Pier
Giorgio Carizzoni, Diana De Rosa, and Fiorenza De Vecchi, et al. (Cinisello Bal-
samo: Silvana, 2000), 6. Illy went on to lead the Assembly of European Regions,
an association promoting the autonomy of transnational regions and committed
to giving them a greater voice in European politics.
lifestyle of the Empress of great interest,” Birbaum suggested.82 His

wife, too, highlighted the personal, individual, and somewhat anoma-
lous nature of Sissi’s ties to Trieste. She noted being particularly happy
that the exhibition took place in Trieste, “an enchanting city with a
typical Central European flair,” and highlighted the “vast cultural and
historical affinity between the city of Trieste and Austria.” At the same
time, in reference to the image of Sissi, Margareta Birbaum observed,
“Over the course of time, Sissi has stood as an exemplar of the mod-
ern, emancipated woman desirous of realizing herself as an individual
and not just as a mother and wife.”83 These perspectives represented
Vienna’s standpoint, overlooking Elisabeth’s meaning in the Adriatic
city where she remained a political symbol of the unity and cosmo-
politanism of Central European life many Triestines sought to recover.
At the same time, the Empress represented a countercurrent to strong
nationalist ideals that permeated civic life and had been at the core of
borderland politics since the end of World War I. While the statue was
an attempt to articulate a city-text emphasizing shared public values, at
the same time, it paradoxically underlined the bitter ethnic and national
conflicts that had divided the city for over a century.84
The gendered, individualistic interpretation of Elisabeth in the Aus-
trian ambassador and his wife’s remarks reflected broader European
tastes of the 2000s. It also emphasized individual perspectives rather
than community or political interests in the heart of Europe. As a rep-
resentation of a female (not male) figure and as a maiden, the statue of
Elisabeth could be read as a more cultural representation of Habsburg
leadership less overtly political than, for example, the statue of Maxi-
milian. Remembered fondly for her grace, beauty, and regality as the
“beautiful princess,” the empress conformed to stereotypically Italian
expectations for fashion, elegance, and style. The memory of her as
a young teenager being swept off her feet by Emperor Franz Joseph
transformed her from a tragic figure thwarted in her personal desires to
a public figure promoting unity, community, and equality.
The city’s marketing plan accompanying the exhibition in 2000
reflected this “feminized” aesthetic and placed it in a political light
outside of highly contested ethnic politics. It recognized the empress’s
iconic appeal, suggesting the exhibit offered the viewer “the impression
of entering into the intimacy of a fairy tale life aware, however, of the
82 Birbaum, “Trieste: un flair,” 8.

83 Birbaum, “Trieste: un flair,” 8–9.
84 Emilia Palonen discusses the city-text constructed by monuments in the urban
landscapes of Central Europe. See Emilia Palonen, “The City-Text In Post-Com-
munist Budapest: Street Names, Memorials, and the Politics of Commemora-
tion,” GeoJournal 73 (2008): 220–1.
126 Sissi’s World
price that the heroine had to pay to have it.” The plan included, for
example, suggestions for involving the entire city in the celebration of
Elisabeth through the sponsorship of contests for the best Sissi shop
window display, hotel suite, and “integrated display of beauty.”85 The
best Sissi menu, cocktail, coffee, and dessert prizes were to draw in the
cooperation of local culinary establishments. Elisabeth’s passion for
fashion was to be celebrated with contests for the best Sissi hairstyle,
clothing, and artisanal object (piece of jewelry or personal object). A
particularly millennial reinterpretation of the Empress’s obsession with
diet and exercise spurred proposals for prizes for the best Sissi diet, best
Sissi fitness program, and the best Sissi exercise fashions for swimming,
horseback riding, and jogging. Nostalgic events to capture the romance
of Sissi’s world were to include a costume ball and an event at the
horseback riding center linked in the public’s mind to the Vienna rid-
ing school and the famed Lipizzaner horses bred originally in Lipica/
Lipizza, a Slovenian town to the west of Trieste in the Carsic hills.86 In
a particularly grand vision, the plan proclaimed (in bold type, capital
letters), “The ‘Sissi’ exhibit cannot be, as it is not, an exhibit/fetish, but
must be above all a grand event to launch Sissimania!”87
Sissimania, however, rested on a fantasy, and enthusiasm for “Sis-
simania” petered out after the exhibit closed. The restoration of Elis-
abetta to her place of honor in front of the train station in 1997 was
followed by the replacement of other public monuments. In 2008, the
bronze monument of Archduke Maximilian was relocated from the
park at Miramare Castle, where it had stood since 1961, to its original
site near the waterfront in Piazza Venezia. Like the female figures, the
statue has Central European and Habsburg connotations. Dressed as an
Admiral, the Archduke stands on a high drum-like platform decorated
with reliefs of the flags of Habsburg Austria and the monarchy’s navy
and merchant marine. The base of the statue’s depiction of the four con-
tinents alternating with small medallions of symbols of science, poetry,
the arts, and industry draws attention to Maximilian’s grounding in
peaceful pursuits and trade, although he stands, ironically, in the piazza
dedicated to the city of Venice, associated with Italian maritime power.
By 2008, European attention had shifted from the Italian–Slovene bor-
der to more contentious politics and contested borderlands elsewhere.
As cross-border communities were forged in the Adriatic region, allu-
sions to landscape and environment came to the forefront in references
to Elisabeth. The flanking marble slabs depicting the homage of the peo-
ple to the sovereign as an allegory of nature, the ones that the original
85 Feriani, Piano di marketing urbano.

86 Feriani, Piano di marketing urbano.
87 Feriani, Piano di marketing urbano, “Analisi SWOT per il ‘Consorzio Sissi’,” 3.
prize jury had added to the Elisabetta statue to reflect the local person-
ality and in recognition of the turn of the twentieth-century Jugendstil
tastes, served a century later as the basis for a “green” reinterpretation.
Based on her appreciation for nature and love of the natural environ-
ment, the Empress became a champion for green politics.
At the current moment, the statue of Elisabetta is not a political
lightning rod. It stands as an emblem to the city’s affection for the
Habsburg Empress and an homage to the past, but does not seem to
attract much attention. The site has been neglected of late. Those driv-
ing along the coastal highway, which flows directly into the city at the
rail station, have chosen the scenic route, not the new highway to the
interior. Rail passengers glide past the Thurn und Taxis Duino Castle
of Rilke’s elegiac fame, past Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian’s seaside
Miramare Castle destined never to be his home, and arrive in the city to
be welcomed by Elisabetta, standing in Liberty Square, named in 1918
to celebrate Trieste’s liberation from the Habsburgs and annexation to
Italy. Most pass by the piazza framed by the sinewy multi-lane Corso
Cavour, named for the Italian statesman hero of the Unification, attend-
ing to the confusion of the traffic and noise rather than the juxtaposition
of states and empires.
Elisabetta is overlooked, and her importance appears to have been
eclipsed by more immediate concerns over economic stagnation and
focus on political problems overseas rather than concerns on Italy’s
eastern borders. In August 2015, an article in Il Piccolo decried the
state of the Elisabetta monument “derelict and defiled by trash.” “It
is a shame,” reported Laura Tonero, “that all of this great fanfare and
enthusiasm [generated to celebrate the restoration of the statue in 1997],
has left us today with an unmaintained and degraded space.”88 While
the city councilor in charge of public works promised to attend to the
situation, the statue which had inspired heated polemics and had stood
for the regeneration of Europe two decades earlier had now faded into
the urban landscape, with the Empress Elisabetta forgotten except by
tourists and others who take a nostalgic interest in Sissi, the iconic fig-
ure of the European past, shrouded in fairytales and myth.
Conclusion
Elisabetta’s return to the front of the railway station in 1997 was
intended to draw out the city’s Habsburg, cosmopolitan past in a period
of Central Europe’s re-emergence. At the turn of the millennium, it
underscored local and Italian state efforts to resurrect the status of the
Adriatic city, once a center of Habsburg imperial maritime trade. Sissi’s
88 Laura Tonero, “Trieste, la statua di Sissi sfregiata da rifiuti e incuria,” Il Piccolo,

August 25, 2015.
128 Sissi’s World
return to a home in the piazza testified to the sharing of public space

between the past imperial and the new global worlds. Depending on
the light in which it is examined, the statue evokes Trieste’s eternal nos-
talgia for the “golden age” of the Habsburgs or it signifies optimism for
the revival of a new Central Europe. The Empress stood for the city’s
overlapping, multiple loyalties seen as a benefit in the new Europe. The
establishment of new agencies and organizations such as the Central
European Initiative (Iniziativa Centro Europea) demonstrated Italy’s
revived interest in the area destabilized by the dismemberment of the
Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the fall of socialist gov-
ernments in Central and Eastern Europe. The statue revealed Italy’s
hope for new economic and political prospects in Central Europe and
the Balkans.
Sissi’s return to the post of prominence in 1997 reflected the tempo-
rary triumph of the optimistic viewpoint in Trieste that saw the revival
of a transnational sentiment and erosion of state borders and national
enmities. The view has been tempered considerably by the events of the
two decades since then, particularly in light of the considerable political
challenges and economic disappointments related to European integra-
tion and the status of new Central European countries and successor
states to Yugoslavia. Yet, Elisabetta continues to find a home in the park
across from the railway station. Sissi’s ability “to last” in Liberty Square
is a result of the multi-valent, multi-vocal resonance that she evokes in
the former Habsburg port city on the Adriatic Sea.
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Six Empress Elisabeth and the
Painting of Modern Life
Olivia Gruber Florek
Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s 1865 state portrait of Empress Elisabeth

(Figure 6.2) has achieved an iconic status within Viennese culture of the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Reproduced on banners
near the Hofburg and gracing the covers of innumerable biographies,
Elisabeth’s diamond-studded hair and spangled tulle gown embody
the lost opulence of the Habsburg monarchy and the fabled beauty of
its penultimate empress. This nostalgia obscures the more complicated
origins of the portrait, the roots of which lie in Elisabeth’s own experi-
mentation with photography, femininity, and celebrity in the 1860s.
Winterhalter was the predictable choice for a series of portraits of the
Habsburg family.1 The artist’s depictions of the French and British mon-
archs established his reputation as the premier aristocratic portrait artist
of the mid-nineteenth century, so much so that in 1866 critic Arthur Ste-
vens wrote, “Every august head appears to require consecration by Win-
terhalter’s brush.”2 Winterhalter’s images were crucial tools of dynastic
representation for the young Emperor Franz Joseph and his wife, as no
previous portraits had suitably captured the magnificence, authority,
and beauty of the imperial couple. This was also a critical moment for
1 Winterhalter produced seven portraits of the Habsburgs: three of Elisabeth; the

state portrait of Franz Joseph; Franz Joseph’s mother, Archduchess Sophie; his
brother Emperor Max of Mexico; and his sister-in-law Empress Carlotta. The
artist resided at Schönbrunn Palace in the fall of 1864 and completed the com-
mission in early 1865. A full description of the commission can be found in Rich-
ard Ormond, “Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria,” in Franz Xaver Winterhalter
and the Courts of Europe, ed. Richard Ormond and Carol Blackett-Ord (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1987), 216–17.
2 Quoted in Helga Kessler Aurisch, “The Ultimate Court Painter,” in High Soci-
ety: The Portraits of Franz Xaver Winterhalter, ed. Helga Kessler Aurisch, Laure
Chabanne, Tilmann Von Stockhausen, and Mirja Straub (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche,
2015), 14.
132 Sissi’s World
Figure 6.1 Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria,

1865, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo Credit:
Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.
Elisabeth and the Painting of Modern Life 133
Figure 6.2 Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, 1865,

oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo Credit: Erich
Lessing / Art Resource, NY.
134 Sissi’s World
Elisabeth’s reputation both within the Habsburg court and across the con-
tinent. Between 1860 and 1864, Elisabeth removed herself from Vienna,
often for months at a time, to pursue treatment for a series of ambigu-
ous illnesses.3 A dazzling portrait would dispel rumors of her illness and
demonstrate her physical capacity to serve as empress-consort.
The resulting state portrait is far different from what Franz Joseph
may have expected. Elisabeth appears without any of the typical accou-
trement of state portraiture: no crown, no imperial drapery, and no ref-
erence to her Habsburg husband. Her primary accessories are a fan and
a tulle shawl, both suitable for a night at the ball, but not an imperial
audience. None of these details alludes to Elisabeth’s husband, a refer-
ence Mary Sheriff called “the defining quality of queenship.”4
These fissures link to visual resources introduced by Elisabeth her-
self. From 1860 to 1864, Elisabeth amassed a collection of over twen-
ty-five hundred cartes de visite, a selection of which she placed within
three volumes that she referred to as “Albums of Beauty.”5 Visual evi-
dence within the “Albums of Beauty” creates a bridge between the rar-
ified world of Winterhalter’s aristocratic portraiture and the emerging
strategies of modern Parisian painting. In one of the beauty albums
(Figure 6.3, called the Amethyst Album for the purple stones on its
cover) Elisabeth pairs photographic reproductions of Winterhalter
paintings with cartes of Parisian prostitutes (see Figures 6.4 and 6.5).
This juxtaposition aligns Winterhalter’s subjects, including Elisabeth,
with the female figures art historians have identified as the central
3 For a description of Elisabeth’s illnesses see Brigitte Hamann, The Reluctant

Empress, trans. Ruth Hein, 6th edn. (Berlin: Ullstein, 2000), especially chapter
four.
4 Mary Sheriff, An Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Poli-
tics of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 154.
5 Selections from Elisabeth’s collection are reproduced in a four-volume collec-
tion edited by Brigitte Hamann and Werner Bokelberg (Dortmund: Harenberg):
Sisis Familienalbum (1980); Fürstenalbum (1981); Künstleralbum (1981); and Schön-
heitenalbum (1980). The thematic organization of these volumes does not reflect
the physical arrangement of the cartes in Elisabeth’s albums, and very few of the
images from the Amethyst Album are reproduced at all. Several of Elisabeth’s
albums were featured in a 1997 exhibition at the Museum Ludwig and in the
accompanying catalogue. See Bodo Von Dewitz, “‘Ich lege mir ein Album an
und sammle nun Photographien’: Kaiserin Elisabeth von Österreich und die
Carte de Visite Photographie,” in Alles Wahrheit! Alles Lüge!: Photographie und
Wirklichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Bodo Von Dewitz and Roland Scott, 94–105
(Cologne: Verlag der Kunst, 1996); Juliane Vogel also devotes part of her chapter
“Schönheit” to the albums in Juliane Vogel, Elisabeth von Österreich: Momente aus
dem Leben einer Kunstfigur (Frankfurt: Neue Kritik, 1998). Additional descrip-
tions of the collection can be found in Beth Muellner, “The Empress Elisabeth of
Austria and her ‘Untidy’ Collection,” Women’s Studies 39 (2010): 536–61.
Figure 6.3 Amethyst Album, carte de visite album from Empress Elis-
abeth’s personal collection, c. 1862–1864, Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Photo Credit: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln.
representatives of modernity.6 Close visual analysis of Winterhalter’s

portrait of Elisabeth alongside the empress’s Amethyst Album reveals
visual and iconographic links between these wildly different objects
and points to collaboration between artist and sitter independent from
the primary patron for the canvas, Emperor Franz Joseph.
The inclusion of visual language from the Parisian demimonde dis-
rupts this tool of Habsburg authority, demanding an examination of
the canvas beyond the sphere of its primary function as imperial rep-
resentation. Describing the power of paintings to visualize contempo-
rary social anxieties, T.J. Clark writes, “For it is only when a painting
recasts or restructures its own procedures—of visualizing, resemblance,
address to the viewer, scale, touch, good drawing and modeling, artic-
ulate composition—that it puts under pressure not just social detail but
social structure.”7 Clark applied this critique to Édouard Manet’s Realist
6 T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers,
rev. edn. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 103. See also S. Hol-
lis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
7 T.J. Clark, “Preface to the Revised Edition” in The Painting of Modern Life, xxiv.
136 Sissi’s World
Figure 6.4 Amethyst Album, carte de visite reproductions of Franz

Xaver Winterhalter, Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her Ladies-in-Waiting
and Florinda, Miethke & Wawra Photographische-Artistische Anstalt,
Wien, c. 1856–1864, page 1 of the Amethyst Album, Museum Ludwig,
Cologne. Photo Credit: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln.
manipulation of traditional academic technique and subject matters,

but Winterhalter’s state portrait of Elisabeth represents a similar inter-
jection. Elisabeth’s portrait visualizes the fragility of the monarchy itself
Figure 6.5 Unknown photographer, Mlle. Armande and Zou Zou, cartes
de visite on page 7 of the Amethyst Album, c. 1862–1864. Museum Lud-
wig, Cologne. Photo Credit: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln.
in an age when ancestral dynasties became more significant as celebri-

ties than political entities. This context invites a reconsideration of the
portrait in light of the modernist visual resources that fuel its stylistic
and iconographic anomalies.
A Winterhalter state portrait may appear an improbable object to
insert within the standard narrative of modernism, whose origins in the
visual arts have been associated by scholars like Clark with paintings
of mid-nineteenth-century urban lifestyles. As a commission intended
to glorify the Habsburg emperor, Elisabeth’s portrait ostensibly engages
none of the political or artistic touchstones traditionally associated with
the movement. Yet, in drawing upon imagery that blurs the boundaries
between elite and demimonde, Elisabeth recognized well in advance of her
peers the necessity of such theatrics in the representation of the ruling
class. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, fame grew as a result of
individual achievement rather than the honor of a person’s social posi-
tion.8 Elisabeth exemplifies this shift, as her renown stemmed from her
appearance as a beautiful, yet unstable woman, instead of her status as
consort. This identity positions Elisabeth as both a producer of culture
8 Leo Braudy describes this transition in The Frenzy of Renown (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986). A more recent analysis of celebrity in the nineteenth
century is Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi, eds., Constructing Charisma: Celebrity,
Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2010).
138 Sissi’s World
and an instrument in the expression of larger political and artistic forces.

Using her album as a resource, Elisabeth shaped a representation that
replaced the visual codes of the ancien regime with imagery rooted in Par-
is’s demimonde. The resulting portrait offers a model of modern feminin-
ity that would resonate with artists until the end of the Habsburg Empire.
The most influential visual culture for Elisabeth at the time of Win-
terhalter’s Viennese residence was photography, specifically the carte
de visite portraits that were produced by the million during the second
half of the nineteenth century.9 Initially, Elisabeth collected portraits of
family members and aristocratic acquaintances, but in March of 1862,
she wrote to her brother-in-law Archduke Ludwig Viktor with a new
request: “I am creating a beauty album, and am now collecting pho-
tographs for it, only of women. Any pretty faces you can muster at
Angerer’s or other photographers, I ask you to send me.”10 In August
of that same year, under Elisabeth’s direction, foreign minister Count
Johann Bernhard von Rechberg instructed Austrian diplomats in Paris,
London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Constantinople to contribute carte
de visite photographs from their capitals for the empress’s collection.
While Elisabeth glued the majority of her cartes in small, leather-bound
albums, she placed the “beauties” within two ornamental albums with
precut openings designed for cartes de visite. These albums allowed col-
lectors to easily move their cartes from page to page, thereby encourag-
ing experimentation with various combinations of individuals. Within
albums like Elisabeth’s, it was typical to find cartes of intimate family
and friends intermingling with portraits of entertainers and members
of the political class. Cartes of such celebrities were available for pur-
chase in the same studios where individuals had their own portraits
made, thereby encouraging combinations of images that were impossi-
ble before the advent of carte de visite technology.11 Elisabeth’s “Albums
of Beauty” mirror this practice; in one volume, the Viennese actress
Charlotte Wolter appears alongside the Parisian ballet star Maria Tag-
lioni and Elisabeth’s own sister Queen Marie of Naples.
9 For a history of cartes de visite see Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the
Carte De Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
10 “Ich lege mir nämlich ein Schönheiten-Album an, und sammele nun Photogra-
phien, nur weiblich dazu. Was Du für hübsche Gesichter auftreiben kannst beim
Angerer und anderen Photographen, bitte ich Dich, mir zu schicken” (transla-
tion mine). Quoted in Brigitte Hamann, introduction to Brigitte Hamann and
Werner Bokelberg, eds., Sisis Schönheitenalbum: private Photographien aus dem
Besitz der Kaiserin Elisabeth (Dortmund: Harenberg, 1980), 7.
11 See McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte De Visite Portrait Photograph, chapter 3,
for an analysis of this practice in Paris. Geoffrey Batchen also describes the prac-
tice of collecting cartes portraits in “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-De-Visite
and the Bourgeois Imagination,” in Image and Imagination, ed. Martha Langford
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005).
While her collection reflects the most contemporary photographic

trends, in curating her albums of photographic beauties, Elisabeth
engaged in an activity long associated with the construction of femi-
nine identity.12 Anne Higonnet describes nineteenth-century women’s
albums as “a widespread, self-conscious, and imaginative interpre-
tation of femininity as a crafted social role.”13 Women across Europe
used albums as settings for the representation of their social values
and domestic spaces, and Val Williams has argued that albums were
an exclusively aristocratic and conservative method of celebrating
upper-class values.14 For Elisabeth, assembling these portraits was a
way of reconstructing and analyzing her relationship to her peers at
a moment when these ties were particularly fraught. Elisabeth built
her photography collection from 1860 to 1864, during the period of her
ambiguous illnesses and extended absences from the Habsburg court.
Rumors within the court suggested that the empress’s maladies were
manufactured to extricate herself from a strained relationship with her
husband and the constant criticism of the Viennese aristocracy. Biog-
rapher Brigitte Hamann referred to this episode as Elisabeth’s “flight”
from her Viennese oppressors, and emphasized the significant increase
in confidence and self-awareness that Elisabeth gained during her
extended absences.15 Photographs were Elisabeth’s constant compan-
ions throughout this maturation process, and the “Albums of Beauty”
became a space where Elisabeth could craft a vision of herself as a con-
noisseur of feminine beauty.
In assembling her collection of photographic beauties, Elisabeth
revitalized an activity modeled by her maternal uncle, King Ludwig
I of Bavaria, whose “Gallery of Beauties” in Munich’s Nymphenburg
Palace was familiar to her.16 Between 1827 and 1850 Ludwig commis-
sioned court painter Joseph Karl Stieler (1781–1858) to produce fif-
ty-one portraits of beautiful women; the subjects were selected by the
king himself, without regard to social class. The variety of women
depicted in the gallery range from aristocratic women such as Lud-
wig’s sister Sophie, who would become Archduchess of Austria and
12 For a history of nineteenth-century album practice, see Patrizia Di Bello, Wom-

en’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2007).
13 Anne Higonnet, “Secluded Vision: Images of Feminine Experience in Nine-
teenth-Century Europe,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History,
ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: IconEditions, 1992), 171.
14 Val Williams, Women Photographers (London: Virago, 1986). Quoted in Bello,
Women’s Albums, 21.
15 See Hamann, Reluctant Empress, especially pages 95–125.
16 For the history of King Ludwig’s gallery, see Gerhard Hojer, Die Schönheitsgalerie
König Ludwigs I, 6th edn. (Regensburg: Verilog Schnell & Steiner GmbH, 2006).
140 Sissi’s World
Elisabeth’s mother-in-law, to an anonymous peasant girl whose beauty

had impressed the king; Ludwig also included Lola Montez, the dancer
who became his mistress. Because she relied upon the contributions
of her ambassadors, Elisabeth could not determine the subjects of her
album to the same extent as her uncle. Nevertheless, her choice to
include women from every social class echoes Ludwig’s desire for a
broad spectrum of beauties.
Within this context, Elisabeth’s selections for her Amethyst Album
become especially significant. The tooled-leather volume contains
eleven erotic photographs submitted by the Parisian ambassador
Prince Metternich and his wife Pauline.17 Other diplomatic attachés
contributed portraits of local aristocratic beauties, but the Metternichs
sent cartes of dancers straddling chairs, spreading their legs, and lift-
ing their skirts (Figure 6.5). Nineteenth-century viewers would have
recognized the cartes as pornographic; similar portraits of prostitutes
in dressing gowns or other stages of undress were distributed in all-
male clubs.18 Such cartes were not tied to specific studios, and their
subjects often used assumed names like Olympe, Zouzou, Aimée, or
Marguérite.19 Two of Elisabeth’s photographs are labeled with these
names, and the choice to segregate these eleven cartes from the rest of
her beauty collection demonstrates her cognizance of their suggestive
themes.20
In contrast, Elisabeth opens the Amethyst Album with images that
initially appear wholly unrelated to the erotic portraits. The album’s first
page (Figure 6.4) contains carte-sized reproductions of Winterhalter’s
Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her Ladies-in-Waiting and his Florinda.21
The cartes themselves may date to Elisabeth’s first encounter with Win-
terhalter’s work eight years earlier. The publisher of these cartes, the
17 A description of the acquisition process can be found in Hamann, introduction

to Hamann and Bokelberg, Sisis Schönheitenalbum, 7–10.
18 McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte De Visite Portrait Photograph, 149. Views of
the stockinged legs of dancers were a permissible eroticism in the 1860s; how-
ever, these images would have been seen as mildly pornographic. For more on
the eroticism of ballet photography, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Legs of
the Countess,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William
Pietz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 266–306.
19 McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte De Visite Portrait Photograph, 104.
20 The Amethyst Album contains only seventeen cartes in total and has many
pages without any cartes at all, while the other two Albums of Beauty hold sig-
nificantly more portraits.
21 Empress Eugénie Surrounded by Her Ladies-in-Waiting (1855, oil on canvas, Musées
nationaux du Palais de Compiègne, Compiègne, on permanent loan from the
Musée national du château de Malmaison) and Florinda (1853, oil on canvas,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City).
Viennese artistic and photographic atelier Miethke and Wawra,22 may

have produced them on the occasion of the 1856 Vienna Kunstverein
exhibition, where Winterhalter’s Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her
Ladies-in-Waiting was the most popular attraction. The painting had
won a first-class medal at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris before
traveling to Vienna in the spring of 1856. The room where Winterhal-
ter’s portrait hung was so popular that exhibition coordinators issued
tickets to control the crowds. The imperial couple made an extended
visit to the exhibition, and it may have been here that Franz Joseph
first considered commissioning Winterhalter to produce portraits of the
Habsburg court.23
Elisabeth pairs the reproduction of Eugénie and her ladies with the
earlier Florinda, where the artist depicts an episode from the legend of
Roderick, the last king of the Visigoths. Roderick peers surreptitiously
at his bathing maids of honor through the trees at back left before
ultimately choosing Florinda as his wife.24 Winterhalter produced the
painting in 1852 as a birthday present for Prince Albert from Queen Vic-
toria. The artist subsequently copied the canvas for the Salon of 1853,
and he used its compositional structure as the basis for his 1855 group
portrait of the French empress and her ladies. The similarities between
these two canvases align the figures of Eugénie and Florinda, suggest-
ing that, like Florinda, the sensuality of Empress Eugénie was just as
available for imperial consumption. In arraying the French ladies of
honor in nearly the same poses as the bathing nudes of Florinda, Win-
terhalter invites the same sexual evaluation that lies at the heart of the
Legend of Roderick. Elisabeth’s choice to include these reproductions
demonstrates her own participation in this critique. Within the album,
Elisabeth appropriates the role of Roderick as an appraiser and, ulti-
mately, a consumer of feminine beauty.
The implied eroticism of Florinda filters into Winterhalter’s group
portrait, which emphasizes the sensual pleasures of the French court.
Eugénie sits in a lushly wooded enclave surrounded by eight ladies-in-
waiting. The shining satin skirts of the attendants create a luxurious car-
pet around the empress, who offers a nosegay of violets to the woman on
her right. The flowers in Eugénie’s hair are echoed across the canvas by
22 As the artistic status of photography was not established in the 1860s, this
description refers to the availability of photographic reproductions of paintings
at this particular studio.
23 Richard Ormond, Introduction to Ormond and Blackett-Ord, eds., Franz Xaver
Winterhalter and the Courts of Europe, 49.
24 For a full description of the Legend of Roderick, see Carol Blackett-Ord,
“Florinda,” in Ormond and Blackett-Ord, eds., Franz Xaver Winterhalter and the
Courts of Europe, 195.
142 Sissi’s World
overflowing floral arrangements, verdant foliage, and corsages pinned

to the breasts of the women’s gowns. In addition to the imagined aroma
suggested by these blooms, the inclusion of flowers points to Eugénie’s
fertility. Alison McQueen interprets the painting within the context of
Eugénie’s reproductive history, as the empress was rumored to have
suffered two miscarriages by the time the painting premiered.25 The
fecundity of Winterhalter’s setting may have been intended to alleviate
fears about Eugénie’s inability to produce an heir, but some contem-
porary critics had a different interpretation. Prosper Mérimée called
Eugénie and her ladies a “troop of tarts in a garden,” an observation
that reveals anxieties about this public display of the French empress’s
sensuality.26 Mérimée’s equation of the empress’s entourage with pros-
titutes suggests that Eugénie’s femininity unsettled the expectation that
an empress be suitably chaste while also promising to produce an heir.
Elisabeth’s inclusion of the two paintings in her Amethyst Album
demonstrates that she also recognized parallels between Eugénie and
the demimonde subjects of the Parisian cartes. Maria Elena Buszek argues
that for nineteenth-century viewers, the more public the woman, the
more “public,” or available, her sexuality.27 Though perhaps accurate
for the women who appeared on the Parisian stage, this assumption
becomes problematic for female consorts. Arguably the most public
women of their time, their sexuality was hardly available for public
consumption. Yet, the sexual activity of an empress was paramount to
her role, as one of her primary responsibilities was the production of
heirs to her husband’s throne. This was particularly true for Habsburg
consorts. Long before Empress Maria Theresa’s renowned fertility,
Habsburg wives were expected to produce numerous heirs for the con-
tinuation of their own ancestral line as well as for marriage to other
leading European houses.28 Elisabeth’s placement of Winterhalter’s
25 Alison McQueen, Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the
Nineteenth Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 97.
26 McQueen, Empress Eugénie and the Arts, 98. For more typical representations of
prostitution in French art of the nineteenth century, see Clayson, Painted Love.
27 On the notion of “public” women see Maria Elena Buszek, Pinup Grrrls: Femi-
ninity, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 29.
The literature on the female body in the nineteenth century is significant, but
for an overview see Susan Sidlauskas, Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century
Painting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Marcia Pointon, Naked
Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830–1908 (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1990); Linda Nochlin, Representing Women (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1999).
28 Maria Theresa was pregnant sixteen times over the course of her nineteen-year
marriage to Emperor Franz Stephan. The political marriages of her children
became a primary diplomatic tool for the empress, giving way to the expression,
group portrait within an album dedicated to erotic imagery suggests an

awareness of this tension between the presumed modesty of an impe-
rial consort and the public expectation of her successful pregnancies.
The implied eroticism of the Winterhalter reproductions justifies
their pairing with the subsequent Parisian cartes, despite the fact that
the cartes exhibit far more self-conscious references to sexual activity.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau refers to such images as prototypes of the
modern pin-up, an image type that “was predicated on the relative iso-
lation of its feminine motif through the reduction or outright elimina-
tion of narrative, literary, or mythological allusion.”29 The photographic
portraits in the Amethyst Album contain no narrative references; rather,
they focus exclusively on the female figures and their erotic postures.
In Figure 6.5, Mlle. Armande wears a crooked hat, and her sliding che-
mise reveals her décolletage. She drapes the rest of her torso with a
black, lace-trimmed fabric, but its positioning exposes the length of her
right thigh. Her off-center position within the frame further emphasizes
the casual, even sloppy production of this carte. Beside her, Zou Zou’s
posture emphasizes her pelvis in a manner comparable with Armande’s
straddling legs, but her theatrical costume and slippered feet place
the portrait within the genre of ballet photography, a marginally more
innocent subject matter.30 Her gestures demonstrate an ability to bal-
ance and extend her legs, but Armande’s squatting position evidences
no such grace.
Perhaps the most brazen element of Armande’s portrait is her direct,
almost confrontational gaze. T.J. Clark argues that the steady eye con-
tact of the subject in Manet’s Olympia (1863) was part of what made
the painting so disturbing to Parisian viewers at the Salon of 1865.31
While eye contact was not uncommon in nudes, as evidenced by Tit-
ian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) or Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Venus
Anadyomène (1848), Clark notes that their gaze was a “dreamy offering
“Let others wage war, but you, happy Austria, marry!” For more on the politi-
cal marriages of the Habsburgs, see Stephen Beller, A Concise History of Austria
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Michael Yonan, Empress
Maria Theresa and the Politics of Imperial Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State
29 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of
Feminine Display,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical
Perspective, ed. Victoria De Grazia and Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996), 131.
30 For more on the eroticism of ballet photography in mid-century France, see
Lynn Garafola, “The Travesty Dancer in Nineteenth-Century Ballet,” Dance
Research Journal 17/18 nos. 1/2 (1985/1986): 35–40.
31 Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). See Clark,
Painting of Modern Life, especially “Olympia’s Choice.”
144 Sissi’s World
of self, [a] looking that was not quite looking.”32 Such eye contact
offers no challenge to the viewer, and it extends the illusion that the
nude exists solely for the viewer’s pleasure. Similarly, Zou Zou gazes
away from the viewer, a choice that mitigates the eroticism of her pose
through an allusion to ballet culture. On the contrary, in Manet’s paint-
ing, Olympia’s gaze involves the viewer as a partner in the financial
and sexual exchange implicit in an interaction with a courtesan. Her
eye contact collapses the distance between subject and beholder, who
now occupies the position of client. Mlle. Armande is comparable, as
the sitter never suggests that her portrait represents anything more
than a titillating glimpse of her body in exchange for the viewer’s cash.
This reference to photographic visual culture directly aligns Winter-
halter with the contemporary Manet. Art historians including Elizabeth
Anne McCauley, Gerald Needham, and Beatrice Farwell have argued
that Manet used nude photography as a source for the candid stare and
unidealized proportions of his Olympia.33 However, McCauley notes
that the use of photography as a visual resource was only acceptable if
the artist transformed the photographic references within the painting,
thereby demonstrating creative vision.34 A portrait artist like Winterh-
alter may have referenced photographs of sitters when completing his
commissions, but his patrons would hardly have wished for the type
of “creative vision” described by McCauley. Consequently, working
with Elisabeth and her photography album offered Winterhalter a rare
opportunity late in his career to execute an innovative fusion of pho-
tographic and aristocratic visual resources. We cannot know whether
Elisabeth showed her “Albums of Beauty” to Winterhalter, but regard-
less of whether she had or not, the artist would certainly have known
about Elisabeth’s uncle King Ludwig I’s similar project. Furthermore,
Joseph Karl Stieler mentored Winterhalter during his student years in
Munich between 1823 and 1828.35 These years coincide with the 1827
initiation of the “Gallery of Beauties,” which means Winterhalter wit-
nessed Stieler’s first portraits for the space. This experience early in his
career may have made Winterhalter receptive to Elisabeth’s vision of
32 Titian, Venus of Urbino (1538, oil on canvas, Uffizi Gallery, Florence); Ingres,
Venus Anadyomène (1848, oil on canvas, Musée Condé, Chantilly). Clark, Painting
of Modern Life, 133.
33 See McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte De Visite Portrait Photograph, 172; Bea-
trice Farwell, Manet and the Nude: A Study in Iconography in the Second Empire
(New York: Garland Publications, 1981); Gerald Needham, “Manet, ‘Olympia,’
and Pornographic Photography,” in Woman as Sex Object, ed. Thomas B. Hess
and Linda Nochlin (New York: Allen Lane, 1973).
34 McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte De Visite Portrait Photograph, 179.
35 Richard Ormond, introduction to Ormond and Blackett-Ord, eds., Franz Xaver
Winterhalter and the Courts of Europe, 22.
beauty and therefore more willing to alter the iconographic traditions

that structure monarchical portraiture.
This integration of photographic iconography explains many of the
key differences between Elisabeth’s state portrait and Winterhalter’s
other images of imperial consorts. When Emperor Franz Joseph com-
missioned Winterhalter to produce portraits of himself and his wife,
he may have envisioned a final product similar to the 1853 pendant
state portraits of Emperor Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie (Figures
6.6 and 6.7). Eugénie dons an imperial costume complete with mantle.
Winterhalter surrounds her with regal objects, including a pearl tiara
and the crown upon the tabouret to her right. She meets the viewer’s
gaze with an impassive expression, which McQueen interprets as sug-
gesting calm assurance and facility.36 Paired with the opulent apparel
and jewelry, Eugénie’s attitude signals her identity as Empress of the
French and her capability to fulfill imperial responsibilities.
Eugénie’s representation invokes several elements from the arche-
type for female monarchical portraiture, Carle Van Loo’s 1741 Portrait
of Marie Leszczinska, wife of the French King Louis XV.37 Eugénie’s
extended right arm mirrors Leszczinska’s raised right wrist, and both
women appear in three-quarter poses. The ornamentation of their space
and sumptuously detailed gowns threaten to overwhelm both figures.
Nevertheless, these luxuries are never an indication of the queen-con-
sort’s force, but rather a demonstration of the power of the king. Van
Loo and Winterhalter reference the king both literally and symbolically
throughout these canvases. Both women gesture toward the pendant
portraits of their husbands, and Louis XV appears in sculptural form
within Van Loo’s painting. Winterhalter places Eugénie within an
imperial reception space that mirrors the surroundings of Napoléon III
in the pendant. These references visualize the king as an omnipresent
authority even in the wife’s representation.38
Winterhalter’s pendant Habsburg portraits upend these conventions
(Figures 6.1 and 6.2). The relationship between the two figures across
the canvases undermines the expected hegemony of an emperor over
his consort. No overt references to Franz Joseph exist within Elisabeth’s
portrait. The artist visually connects the pendant paintings through the
landscape behind the fantasy architectural setting, but this space is not
36 McQueen, Empress Eugénie and the Arts, 94.

37 Carle Van Loo, Portrait of Marie Leszczinska (1741, oil on canvas, 1748, Château de
Versailles, Versailles).
38 For an extended analysis of this portrait and its significance within the history
of female monarchical portraiture, see Sheriff, Exceptional Woman, chapter five.
See also Jennifer Germann, Picturing Marie Leszczinska (1703–1768) (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2015).
146 Sissi’s World
Figure 6.6 Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Emperor Napoléon III of France,

1853, oil on canvas copy of lost painting by Winterhalter, Chateaux de
Versailles et de Trianon. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.
Figure 6.7 Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Empress Eugénie of France, 1853, oil
on canvas, Chateaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo Credit: RMN-
Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
explicitly a Habsburg landholding. Franz Joseph’s portrait includes all

of the symbolic heraldry one would expect for the heir of an ancient
hereditary line. His red and white Austrian military costume is laden
with medals and insignias of the various noble awards held by the
Habsburg emperor, and his field marshal’s helmet and cape lay dis-
carded on the chair behind him. In spite of these emblems of power,
Franz Joseph appears stiff and shrinking in comparison with Elisabeth,
whose physical presence dominates the pairing. The sheer size of Elis-
abeth’s gown dwarfs the emperor, and the light emanating from her skirt
draws the viewer’s eyes away from his canvas. Elisabeth’s costume fails
to reference the emperor in terms of its function. Franz Joseph appears
in attire that directly alludes to his imperial status, but Elisabeth wears
a Frederick Worth ball gown without any sash or jewelry related to an
aristocratic title, and she studs her hair with diamond stars instead of a
Habsburg crown jewel. Rather than a celebration of her role as imperial
consort, the state portrait immortalizes her as queen of the ball.
Elisabeth’s success in shaping her representation is especially evi-
dent in areas where Winterhalter integrates tropes of the traditional
female-consort portrait. Elisabeth holds a fan that should function as
a reference to Franz Joseph. Its angle mirrors the raised right arms of
Eugénie and Marie Leszczinska, both of whom direct the viewer toward
the French monarchs occupying the pendant portrait. Elisabeth’s fan
points in Franz Joseph’s direction, but its placement does not suggest
the deliberate gestures of the French queens. Their pale arms are framed
by the dark background, while Elisabeth’s fan blends into the overall
shape and color schema of her gown. Rather than visually linking the
two figures across the canvases, the fan further divides the monarchs
and highlights the differences between their costume and posture. Elis-
abeth appears poised to raise the fan toward her upper body, a motion
far more common at a ball than an imperial audience.
The direction of gazes across the two portraits further destabilizes
the authority of the emperor. Franz Joseph looks at his wife, who in
turn looks out at the viewer. This choice seems to align with the Marie
Leszczinska portrait, whose sculpture of the king also gazes upon his
wife, who then directs her glance toward the viewer. Sheriff argues that
in this arrangement, Marie Leszczinska becomes the object of the king’s
showing; it is the king who allows her to be viewed.39 Yet a parallel
authority does not exist within Winterhalter’s pendant, as the gaze of
Franz Joseph appears directionless and empty. Called “grandiloquent,
but unmemorable” by Gabriel Badeau-Päun, Franz Joseph’s gaze con-
veys none of the magnanimity of Napoléon III’s steady eye contact.40 In
39 Sheriff, Exceptional Woman, 154.

40 Gabriel Badea-Päun, The Society Portrait: From David to Warhol (New York: Ven-
dome, 2007), 96.
148 Sissi’s World
contrast, Elisabeth looks directly at the viewer with a knowing stare. Her
look is neither dreamy nor impassive, and is almost flirtatious. Elisabeth
holds her face in the same three-quarter posture as Marie Leszczinska
and Eugénie, but she twists her body in an entirely different direction.
While the French queens face their torsos toward their husbands, Elis-
abeth’s turned shoulders reveal her upper back to the viewer and delib-
erately block her husband’s view of her body. It was not uncommon
to feature a plunging neckline within a queen’s portrait,41 but none of
Winterhalter’s portraits highlight the upper back of his sitters. Winterh-
alter paints Elisabeth’s shoulder blades with the brightest whites of the
canvas and places this swath of flesh nearly in the center of his com-
position. The sweep of her gown against the lower right quadrant of
the canvas suggests a motion away from the viewer. Elisabeth sashays
toward the landscape, removing herself from the confines of the fantasy
architectural space and perhaps inviting the viewer to join her.
It is here that Elisabeth’s Amethyst Album enters as a visual resource,
for the coy quality of Elisabeth’s expression aligns the portrait with the
forthright eye contact of the dancer Mlle. Armande. Just as Armande looks
out from her portrait without any pretense of narrative or play-acting,
Elisabeth’s eye contact reveals her own awareness of being looked at,
a knowledge that shatters the illusion of anonymity on the part of the
viewer. Other Winterhalter portraits preserve a distance between the
subject and beholder, a remove that allows viewers to observe the beau-
tiful subject without being on view themselves. In contrast, the state
portrait of the Austrian empress recalls the expression of Manet’s Olym-
pia, which was also exhibited in 1865. Like Olympia, Elisabeth appears
cognizant of the simultaneity of viewing and being viewed. Her engag-
ing expression, dynamic posture, and the interplay of skin, diamonds,
hair, and fabrics combine to conjure the illusion of tactility, provoking
the viewer to reach out and actually touch the empress. Yet such contact
is blocked by the mass of tulle that consumes nearly a third of the com-
position. Similar to the fabric obscuring the genitals of Mlle. Armande
and Zou Zou, Elisabeth’s portrait invites the viewer to imagine the
body beneath the gown while permanently denying access. However,
it is not only the physicality of the gown that creates a barrier, but also
Elisabeth’s authority as an individual who has molded and formed the
encounter. It is her individuality that determines the viewer’s experi-
ence of her portraits, thereby undermining the Habsburg court’s desire
to shape her into their ideal empress. For unlike the images of courte-
sans produced by canonical modernist artists, or even her aristocratic
41 See, for example, Winterhalter’s bust-sized portrait of Empress Eugénie in

an evening bodice produced in the same year: Empress Eugénie, 1864, Musée
national du château de Malmaison, inv. No. MMPO.203.
peers in the oeuvres of Winterhalter or Ingres, Elisabeth commands the

viewer’s encounter with her famous body.
This same play between accessibility and inaccessibility is part of
the nascent celebrity culture emerging in the nineteenth century. A rel-
atively new concept in the 1860s, celebrity had ambiguous implications
for absolute monarchs; they were representatives of this new phenom-
enon, while also serving as examples for the type of fame that it had
replaced. Prior to the eighteenth century, an office rather than an indi-
vidual earned renown; celebrity developed when honor shifted from the
position to the person occupying it.42 According to Leo Braudy, celebrity
is also marked by the broad knowledge of an individual’s personal life,
despite limited access to the actual individual.43 Above all, celebrities
were acclaimed for their individual personalities. As absolute monarchs
were wary of appearing as anything other than dignified and deserving
inheritors of their thrones, celebrity seemed an unsuitable status.
Celebrity culture’s embrace of individuality aligned with Elisabeth’s
interests, however, and became an opportunity to direct her own rep-
resentation. She exercised herself into impossible slenderness, thereby
building a continental reputation for physical rigor and a fifty-centimeter
waistline. News of the empress’s beauty circulated across the continent
by diplomatic visitors to Vienna, and reproductions of the Winterhal-
ter portraits only amplified these tales. Within the painting, Elisabeth’s
shapely shoulder, minuscule waist, and dazzling apparel all project her
desirability. However, the visual barriers to contact with the empress
suggest her control over this sensuality. For though her body is on dis-
play, the fact that she had not been pregnant in seven years suggests that
her husband had no access to it. The Winterhalter portraits remained in
the Hofburg until 1870, which means its primary viewers—the Viennese
aristocracy—were deeply aware of these tensions between Franz Joseph
and his wife.44 Elisabeth’s assured expression implies an awareness of
this discrepancy, and perhaps even pleasure in her control over her body.
The shift away from renown toward celebrity had unfortunate con-
sequences for a nineteenth-century absolute monarch like Franz Joseph,
and therein lies the failure of Winterhalter’s portrait of the Habsburg
emperor. Describing the painting, Mirja Straub writes, “his character
disappears behind the façade of his function.”45 For Franz Joseph, the
dignity of his office was far more compelling than the details of his
personality, leading to a rigid formality in his self-presentation. Nearly
42 Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 2010), 4.
43 Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 15.
44 Ormond, “Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria,” 217.
45 Mirja Straub, “Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Painter of Women,” in Aurisch, et al.,
High Society: The Portraits of Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 54.
150 Sissi’s World
as much as his ubiquitous military uniform, Franz Joseph was asso-

ciated with his office. Stylized as the empire’s “first bureaucrat,”46 he
spent fourteen hours each day completing paperwork within his study.
Although he desired to maintain a position as the inscrutable and digni-
fied leader of his empire, he had to contend with an increasing demand
by the public for intimate knowledge of his person. Reproduced in
daily journals, the banal details of the emperor’s daily activities under-
mined the austere façade of divine right essential to his post-revolution-
ary government. In spite of these ambiguities, Franz Joseph maintained
confidence in his absolutist privilege. Elisabeth, however, was less
convinced by her role within the monarchy, or of the future of the insti-
tution itself.47 It is perhaps for this reason that she turned increasingly to
images from the demimonde as models for her own vision of femininity.
Portraits of monarchs saturated visual culture of the nineteenth cen-
tury, which suggests that we should look beyond the sphere of aris-
tocratic portraiture to evaluate the enduring influence of Elisabeth’s
construction. The empress’s cascading hair, waif-like figure, and doc-
umented melancholia48 align with many of the features celebrated by
the artists of the later Viennese Secession.49 Gustav Klimt was highly
familiar with the empress and the visual culture surrounding her por-
traiture. In his early career as an architectural painter, Klimt was among
a team of artists who decorated the interior of Elisabeth’s 1886 hunting
lodge in Vienna’s Lainzer Tiergarten, the Hermesvilla. Yet, ties between
Elisabeth’s state portrait and the Secessionist’s later images of Vienna’s
bourgeoisie extend beyond this circumstantial evidence.
Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), the most celebrated portrait of the
artist’s Golden Style, exhibits the same tension between sensuality and
inaccessibility witnessed in Winterhalter’s image of Elisabeth.50 Klimt’s
work imitates many tropes of aristocratic portraiture canonized in the
nineteenth century. Bloch-Bauer appears enthroned upon a golden
46 Beller, Concise History of Austria. For more on Franz Joseph see Jean-Paul Bled,
Franz Joseph, trans. Teresa Bridgeman (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992).
47 Elisabeth considered Switzerland’s republican government more secure than a
monarchy. See Hamann, Reluctant Empress, 283.
48 See Hamann, Reluctant Empress, 265–78, especially 278 where Elisabeth’s daugh-
ter Marie-Valerie describes her mother’s suicidal tendencies.
49 For analysis of the relationship between mental illness and the art of fin-de-siècle
Vienna, see Gemma Blackshaw and Leslie Topp, eds., Madness and Modernity:
Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900 (Burlington, VT: Lund Hum-
phries, 2009).
50 Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907, oil, gold, and silver on canvas, Neue
Galerie, New York City). For more on Klimt’s portraits of women, see: Fritz
Novotny and Johannes Dobai, Gustav Klimt (New York: Praeger, 1967); Tobias
G. Natter, Gerbert Frodl, and Neda Bei, eds., Klimt’s Women (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2000); and Tobias G. Natter, ed., Gustav Klimt: The Com-
plete Paintings (Cologne: Taschen, 2012).
armchair, her billowing gown occupying nearly a third of the canvas.

Klimt depicts the twenty-six-year-old wife of the wealthy sugar mag-
nate with flushed cheeks and a dreamy gaze. Her rouged cheeks amplify
the red of her mouth, and traces of this hue appear in the skin above her
eyes and between her fingers. Her expression is sultry, and the liquid
quality of her lidded eyes and loosely parted lips suggest a shared inti-
macy with the viewer. The subtle blue and green-modeled texture of
her porcelain skin invites the viewer to imagine the tautness of her flesh
above her collarbone and the tactility of Bloch-Bauer’s grasping hands.
Klimt disrupts the illusionism of Bloch-Bauer’s body with the insist-
ent two-dimensionality of her sweeping gown and jewelry. The move-
ment from flesh to fabric shifts the entire texture of the canvas, as the
tangibly paint-like surface of the stacked geometric shapes on the Wie-
ner Werkstätte-inspired garment produce a physical barrier between
the viewer and the subject. Pale forearms emerge from the sleeves,
punctuated with gold and jewel-encrusted bangles, and the abstracted
patterns deny any access to the flesh tantalizingly represented above.
Klimt reinforces this boundary through the use of gold and silver paint;
the delicate surfaces literally flash as they catch the light.
This reflective quality evokes the spangled tulle of Elisabeth’s gown,
where the foil stars similarly obstruct the space between Elisabeth and
her viewer. Winterhalter applied the paint for these stars employing the
same loose brushstrokes that characterizes his later work, thus creating
a two-dimensional grid across Elisabeth’s body that threatens to under-
mine the illusionism of the entire canvas. Standing before Elisabeth’s
portrait, the insistent materiality of silver paint erects a barrier across the
surface of the field, creating an unstable tension between the naturalism
of the figure and the physicality of the actual canvas. Winterhalter’s tech-
nique can be seen in later portrait practice by both Klimt and Hans Makart
(1840–1884) in which the artists embed their sitters within layers of brush-
work that nearly overwhelm the individual identity of the subject.51 This
margin visualizes the fortifications Elisabeth herself created around her
person; cloaked in the imagery of the Parisian demimonde, Elisabeth dis-
tanced herself from the figurative and literal responsibilities of her posi-
tion, crafting an independent vision of authoritative femininity.
In conclusion, it is worth returning to Clark’s discussion of how
Manet’s Olympia uses the category of “courtesan” to put established
notions of “picturing” under pressure.52 Similarly, Elisabeth used
51 For a discussion of this technique in Makart and Klimt’s portraiture, see Doris
H. Lehmann, “Portraying Viennese Beauty: Makart and Klimt,” in Facing the
Modern: the Portrait in Vienna 1900, ed. Gemma Blackshaw (London: National
Gallery Company, dist. Yale University Press, 2013). See also Gerbert Frodl, Hans
Makart: Monographie und Werkverzeichnis (Salzburg: Residenz, 1974).
52 Clark, Painting of Modern Life, xiv.
152 Sissi’s World
her “Albums of Beauty” as spaces to reconstruct the visual codes of

“empress.” As the wife of the Habsburg emperor, she had the opportu-
nity to test this construction within the most exalted cultural spheres of
her time, though not necessarily the most avant-garde. Yet, in focusing
on the formulaic aspects of Winterhalter’s portraiture, we overlook the
spaces where he subverted the genre. Nowhere is this more apparent
than the state portrait of Elisabeth, where ruptures between the codes
of monarchical imagery and her alluring appearance complicate our
understanding of nineteenth-century queens as chaste symbols of ret-
rograde institutions. For just as Manet’s Olympia made visible anxieties
over the representation of femininity, so too do these portraits of Elis-
abeth.
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Seven
Karl Lagerfeld and the Elisabeth
Myth
Carolin Maikler (Translated by
Marieanne Gilliat-Smith)
Empress Elisabeth of Austria and Karl Lagerfeld—at first glance two

very different celebrities, yet closer examination reveals several sim-
ilarities: a striking appearance (her sophisticated plait, his powdered
Mozart ponytail), an obvious desire to stand out from the crowd (she
typically carrying a fan and parasol, he his fan along with his signa-
ture black sunglasses), and, lastly, an eccentric lifestyle determined by
autonomy and discipline. These trademarks have turned the monarch
and the fashion designer into charismatic leading personalities who
both managed to achieve iconic status in their lifetimes. As eminent
aesthetes, both devote their lives invariably to beauty: from the pursuit
of the perfect body to their shared love of the arts, they each design a
world based on their personal ideals. And last but not least, they both
share a fateful date: on 10 September 1898 in Geneva, the Empress fell
victim to a brutal assassination, while on this day thirty-five years later
in Hamburg, Lagerfeld was born. Even though this means Elisabeth
and Lagerfeld could never meet in real life, they still connect in an
on-going spiritual and artistic dialogue, as Lagerfeld has not only been
inspired by the myth surrounding Elisabeth as a fashion designer but
also as a photographer and film director.
Today, Empress Elisabeth of Austria is considered a modern myth.1
Since the production of Ernst Marischka’s 1950s film trilogy Sissi, it
has been impossible to imagine modern culture without this historical
personality. However, the myth-making surrounding Elisabeth started
1 In a recent volume on modern myths, Stephanie Wodianka and Juliane Ebert

do not list the Austrian monarch on her own. Elisabeth is mentioned only in the
contributions about Queen Louise, Lady Diana, and Romy Schneider. Steph-
anie Wodianka and Juliane Ebert, eds. Metzler Lexikon moderner Mythen: Figuren,
Konzepte, Ereignisse (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2014), 230–4, 333–5.
156 Sissi’s World
much earlier. The period around 1900, shortly after the Empress’s brutal
murder, saw the emergence of a Sisi cult across Europe—especially in
the literature of the Decadent Movement, as well as in related painting
and sculpture. Poetic obituaries, portraits, and statues were produced
to keep the memory of the monarch alive. These works often referred to
each other to celebrate Elisabeth’s outer and inner beauty. The remark-
able variety of techniques and approaches artists used to depict the
Empress gave the persona a magical depth and an elitist aura, which
greatly contrasts with today’s mostly one-dimensional image.2
This tendency towards a superficial depiction of the Empress has
become apparent since the decline of the Habsburg monarchy: in pop-
ular operettas and films the historical figure—now answering to the
nickname Sisi, mainly written Sissy or Sissi—has been reduced to an
uncultured and obstreperous teenager. This shift in the characterization
of the figure culminated in Marischka’s cinematic Sissi trilogy, which
can be interpreted as an expression of escapist falsification of historical
fact and conscious re-construction of identity.3
Only towards the end of the twentieth century did people begin to take
a more differentiated view of the monarch. In her biography about The
Reluctant Empress, as she subtitled her book, along with the Poetic Journal,
Brigitte Hamann has been able to redress, from the historians’ perspective,
the distorted and biased image of Sisi.4 With access to more recent histor-
ical research Sylvester Levay and Michael Kunze have attempted to paint
a critical picture of the monarch on an artistic level, while also making
it marketable and appealing for the masses with their musical Elisabeth,
which premiered in 1992, six years prior to the centenary of her death.
Attempts to match newly discovered historical sources with the cur-
rent Zeitgeist and the growing influence and development of the media
result in competing and partly contradictory impressions of this his-
torical figure. In Elisabeth’s case these impressions range from “White
Fairy,” as depicted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter in his painting Empress
Elisabeth of Austria (1865) and handed down through the medium of
film, to “Black Empress.” Mainly responsible for this latter image,
2 For more detailed information see Carolin Maikler, Kaiserin Elisabeth von Öster-
reich. Die Entstehung eines literarischen Mythos (Würzburg: Ergon, 2011).
3 This is one possible reading of the film. Susanne Marschall, “Sissis Wandel unter
den Deutschen,” in Idole des deutschen Films: Eine Galerie von Schlüsselfiguren, ed.
Thomas Koebner (Munich: Ed. Text + Kritik, 1997), 372–83. Heidi Schlipphacke
offers another reading in this volume; see Heidi Schlipphacke, “Melancholy
Empress: Queering Empire in Ernst Marischka’s ‘Sissi’ Films,” Screen 51, no. 3
(2010): 232–55.
4 Brigitte Hamann, Elisabeth: Kaiserin wider Willen (Vienna: Amalthea, 1981); and
Brigitte Hamann, ed., Kaiserin Elisabeth, Das poetische Tagebuch (Vienna: Akade-
mie der Wissenschaften, 2003).
Karl Lagerfeld and the Elisabeth Myth 157
dating from around 1900, was the monarch’s Greek teacher Constantin
Christomanos and his Tagebuchblätter.5 These two faces of the historical
figure are reflected in the two names “Elisabeth” and “Sisi.” Although
both describe the same person, they reveal two very different aspects
of her character: “Elisabeth” is the self-confident, unapproachable, and
strong woman who wants to live her own life. Contrary to this, “Sisi”
is the pleasant, childlike fairy queen who enchants the world. It is this
ambiguity that has kept her myth alive. And this enthusiasm for the Sisi
myth shows no sign of fading, even in the twenty-first century, as the
regular updating of the myth proves.6 Those committed myth-makers
come from diverse fields; one of them is Karl Lagerfeld.7
During his multifarious career, Lagerfeld has focused on Elisabeth of
Austria twice, publishing a book of photographs and, eighteen years later,
a short film about the monarch. This time gap along with the different
nature of the projects begs the question of exactly which image or, indeed,
which images, the designer has ultimately produced. Did his perception of
the historical figure change over time? To what extent has he perpetuated
the myth of Elisabeth? And what are the intentions behind his two works?
As “Man of the Century”8 Lagerfeld is a prominent global celebrity,
omnipresent in the media across the world. Several biographies as well
as fictional representations have been written about him.9 In contrast to
the considerable interest in his persona, however, Lagerfeld’s artistic
oeuvre has not always been received positively. While achieving inter-
national critical acclaim as a fashion designer, including recognition
from cultural studies experts,10 specialists and professionals are divided
5 Constantin Christomanos, Tagebuchblätter, vol. 1 (Vienna: Moritz Perles, 1899).

6 Allison Pataki’s novel, Sisi: Empress on Her Own (New York: The Dial Press,
2016); Christian Qualtinger and Reinhard Trinkler’ graphic novel, Sisi: The
Immortal Empress (Vienna: Amalthea 2016); and Daisy Goodwin’s novel, The For-
tune Hunter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014).
7 The Austrian Empress also inspired other great fashion designers such as Chris-
tian Dior and Carolina Herrera. Elisabeth continues to be a symbol of elegant
style. Hannelore Schlaffer, Alle meine Kleider: Arbeit am Auftritt (Springe: zu
Klampen, 2015), 23–5.
8 Lothar Strobach, Der Fotograf Karl Lagerfeld: Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen
Schönheit, Parallelen und Dissonanzen zu seinem künstlerischen ‘alter Ego’ Andy War-
hol (Gmund/Tegernsee: Druckhaus am See, 2012), 5.
9 For example, Paul Sahner, Karl (Munich: mvg, 2015) and John Von Düffel, KL.
Gespräch über die Unsterblichkeit (Cologne: Dumont, 2015), respectively.
10 Recently Lioba Keller-Drescher, “Aus der Ornamental Farm in die ‘Chanel-Scheune’:
Inszenierungen und Transformationen ländlicher Moden,” in Trachten in der Lüne-
burger Heide und im Wendland, ed. Karen Ellwanger, Andrea Hauser, and Jochen Mein-
ers (Münster: Waxmann, 2015), 355–61. On March 11, 2015, Keller-Drescher gave a
lecture about Chanel and the Métiers d’Art collections in Berlin in the lecture series
MODE Thema MODE. Lioba Keller-Drescher, “Chanel/Lagerfeld/Métiers d’Art—
Die permanente Erfindung der Tradition,” nmt 2016—Jahrbuch netzwerk mode textil
(2016).
158 Sissi’s World
over his talent as a photographer, despite Lagerfeld’s more than twen-

ty-nine years of experience in the field and his strong public presence
in galleries and museums.11 Academic research has equally ignored the
photographer Lagerfeld, and, apart from some isolated articles in var-
ious exhibition catalogs, there is only one monograph on Lagerfeld’s
photography, written by former journalist Lothar Strobach.12
More recently, the fashion designer has established himself as direc-
tor of short films, mostly about the history of the fashion house Chanel.13
These films have received a lot of commentary online but no critical
academic attention. Thus Lagerfeld, as a photographer and filmmaker,
remains effectively undiscovered by academia; this piece will take
a first step towards an academic evaluation. It will demonstrate that
Lagerfeld’s works are highly complex and reflect on cultural transition
in an almost prophetic manner. All this justifies scholarly appreciation.
A comparison of Lagerfeld’s two works on Elisabeth reveals some
striking similarities. In both, location is the source of inspiration: the
photography book features the imperial villa on Corfu, Achilleion,
while the short film is set in the Austrian city of Salzburg, where Elis-
abeth stayed during her bridal journey in 1854. Furthermore, Lagerfeld
uses the same mythopoetic method in both book and film to depict the
monarch, a method he has termed “reincarnation.”14 Despite not believ-
ing in reincarnation himself,15 Lagerfeld plays with this concept, some-
times using it self-consciously as a deconstructing mise-en-scène, and
at other times as a fictitious reincarnation of Elisabeth. For each version
of Elisabeth, Lagerfeld casts the top model who was his muse at the
11 See the catalog for his exhibition, Visions of Fashion: Photographs, at the Pitti Pal-
ace in Florence.
12 Strobach, Der Fotograf.
13 See, for example, the films The Tale of a Fairy (2011), Once Upon a Time (2013), The
Return (2013), and Once and Forever (2015). All available at: http://chanel-news.
chanel.com/de_DE/home.media.video.html (accessed November 2, 2017).
14 This term was coined in the mid-nineteenth century. The idea of the transmi-
gration of souls, also called “metempsychosis,” existed in ancient mysticism,
and today it is a central aspect of eastern religions. Generally, the theory of rein-
carnation means that, after death, souls will be reborn again and again, until
they are finally liberated from this cycle. For more details see Matthias Kroß,
“Reinkarnation,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 8, ed. Joachim
Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1992), 553–4; and Johanna Buß, “Reinkarnation,” in Wörterbuch der Religionen,
ed. Christoph Auffarth, Hans G. Kippenberg, and Axel Michaels (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 427–9.
15 In an interview Lagerfeld explained, “The beauty of death is that if there is a
next life, we don’t remember anything of the previous life. But I don’t believe in
reincarnation. […] There are more and more people in the world. Then the time
of reincarnation should become shorter and shorter, otherwise it wouldn’t be
possible to reproduce so many people. Have as many people already died, as
now live in the world?” Sahner, Karl, 135–6.
time of inception of the respective work: Nadja Auermann for his pho-
tography book and Cara Delevingne in his short film. Both women are
considered to be icons of beauty, thus providing a direct connection to
the Austrian monarch, who ranked among the most beautiful women
of the nineteenth century.
In both the photographs as well as the short film various cultural
artifacts inspire Lagerfeld’s unique image of the Empress: literary
works are referenced by the designer, but more significant is his use of
painting which as a visual medium is, of course, closer to the viewer’s
experience of photography or film. It is important to emphasize that
the most famous painting of the Empress, the portrait by Winterhal-
ter, is the driving inspiration behind both the photographs and short
film. This painting has become part of the collective perception of the
Empress like no other; adorning every form of souvenir, it has become
her trademark logo, and especially in the performing arts, whether
operetta, film, or musical, Elisabeth is always to be seen in her white
starry gown.16 In Lagerfeld’s works, the painting recurs explicitly and
implicitly. A detailed analysis of book and film will show how the fash-
ion designer uses the popular portrait to explain his own view of the
Austrian Empress.
ΑΧΙΛΛΕΙΟΝ · ACHELLEIO · L’ACHILLEION

Lagerfeld’s photography book AXIΛΛEION · ACHELLEIO · L’ACHIL-
LEION, published in 1996,17 met with fierce criticism: “The snaps Lager-
feld photographed together with stylists, hairdressers and assistants on
Corfu are visual trash.”18 The following analysis of the photographs
will not be an evaluation of Lagerfeld’s skill as a photographer: the pri-
mary focus is on the work as a contemporary version of the Elisabeth
myth. In this respect, Lagerfeld’s perpetuation of the myth is modern
and is not at all as dull as Ziegler maintains. As with every piece of art,
interpretations of the photographs depend on the viewer’s own body
16 The portrait influenced many artists, above all photographers such as Man Ray
and Cecil Beaton, and also fashion designers, recently Maria Grazia Chiuri for
Dior. For some time, the painter Winterhalter has been undergoing a revival.
The exhibition High Society: The Portraits of Franz Xaver Winterhalter (Franz Xaver
Winterhalter: Maler im Auftrag Ihrer Majestät) was shown—after its premiere in
Germany—in the USA and France. See the exhibition catalog: Helga Kessler
Aurisch, Laure Chabanne, Tilmann von Stockhausen, and Mirja Straub, eds.
High Society: The Portraits of Franz Xaver Winterhalter (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art
Publishers, 2015).
17 Karl Lagerfeld, ΑΧΙΛΛΕΙΟΝ · ACHELLEIO · L’ACHILLEION (Göttingen: Steidl,
1996).
18 Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, “Ein Lob für visuellen Müll,” Die Zeit, September 27, 1996.
Available at: http://www.zeit.de/1996/40/Ein_Lob_fuer_visuellen_Muell/kom-
plettansicht (accessed November 2, 2017).
160 Sissi’s World
of knowledge. Consequently, Elisabeth experts can engage with the

photographs in a more complex manner than can an audience lacking
background knowledge.
The sixty-nine photographs (including the title picture) in black and
white or black and gold are accompanied by an explanatory foreword
written by Lagerfeld as well as quotations in French, English, and Ger-
man.19 At the back of the book, there are two excerpts of text that could
serve as literary basis and aid for interpreting the photographs: a pas-
sage from Christomanos’s Tagebuchblätter and a chapter from Maurice
Barrès’s essay Une impératrice de la solitude (An empress of solitude), that
mostly cites Christomanos’s accounts in French translation. The Greek
teacher describes his first visit to the Achilleion on Corfu together with
the Empress of Austria. Barrès frames this experience by reflecting on
the monarch’s genealogy.20
The multilingual approach, evident already in the book’s title, is
probably due to the organization commissioning the book. Accord-
ing to Ziegler, it was ordered by the Greek Tourist Board. On a more
complex level, one can, however, interpret the different languages as
symbolizing the globe-trotting monarch’s zest for travel. Furthermore,
it is perhaps also a reference to Lagerfeld himself, the cosmopolitan,
addressing an international public audience.
The location of Achilleion with its big garden clearly conjured up
classical associations for Lagerfeld. He visualizes the villa as a symbol
of Philhellenism, the Teutonic or northern European love for antiquity,
which was fashionable in the nineteenth century. Corfu is transformed
into a site of longing, a personal arcadia for the Empress where antiq-
uity is resurrected as a haven onto which she can simultaneously project
her own desires and ideas. Thus, for Lagerfeld Achilleion is a mythical
space: “There, Achilleion is more mythical than mythological. […] You
get the impression that Elisabeth lived in this domicile like in a sort of a
temple open for the gods, who appear personally to the people.”
Lagerfeld brings the imperial dreams to life once more by explicitly
identifying his short photo-story as a dream: “The pictures of this book
are the records of a dream.” The inspiration for this idea could have
come from Christomanos, who compared the entrance to Achilleion
with the entrance to a dream world:
In what a light youth everything was that my eye saw here.

All the well-known trees and stones seemed to be new, nearly
19 Neither the photographs nor the book pages are numbered, thus the numbers
are my own, offered to better orient the reader and hereafter quoted in the text
as: (photograph [number]).
20 Regarding Christomanos and Barrès see Maikler, Kaiserin, 123–65, 327–39.
marvelous to me […]—as if I had happened upon an unreal

world. Like coming from another darker earth, I arrived here at a
beach, where a brighter life existed. It was like I found myself in
another dimension of being and feeling.21
By taking monumental photographs in both daylight and at night,

Lagerfeld has captured the magic of the location. The designer starts off
focusing on isolated nooks and courtyards described by Christomanos
in his Tagebuchblätter, and he goes on to stage little scenes there.22 Lager-
feld explains the plot of his dream-story in his preface: a young German
student is visiting the imperial villa on Corfu together with a friend.
She is overcome by the beauty of the place together with the beauty of
the young Greek selling postcards at the entrance gate. Inspired by her
encounter, she dreams the following scenario: “she [the young student]
imagined herself to be the contemporary reincarnation of the figure
both romantic and fragile of the beautiful monarch fantastic through
tragic destiny. In her dream, the young man becomes simultaneously
Achilles and Mr. Christomanos, the Greek reader to the empress.”23
As the main character of the dream sequence, the young woman,
played by Nadja Auermann, is the center point of the photographs, fea-
turing in a total of thirty-two photographs, nearly half of the book. She
is styled as a contemporary Elisabeth dressed in designs from the Karl
Lagerfeld Spring/Summer collection of 1996.24
The equally beautiful young Greek, played by Swedish model Alex
Lundqvist, is adorned in white robes or is naked, appropriate for his
role as a divine marble statue incarnate. He bears little resemblance to
the real life small, hunchbacked figure of Christomanos. Instead, it is
the third figure, played by the friend of the young woman, who more
obviously recalls the Empress’s Greek teacher.25 Styling her in the role
of servant by dressing her in a black, priest-like robe completed with
21 Quoted in ΑΧΙΛΛΕΙΟΝ with orthographic changes. Constantin Christomanos,

Tagebuchblätter, 145–6.
22 Lagerfeld translated many literary works into photography books; for example,
Karl Lagerfeld, Faust (Göttingen: Steidl, 1995), A Portrait of Dorian Gray (Göt-
tingen: Steidl, 2005), and Hirten-geschichten von Daphnis und Chloe (Göttingen:
Steidl, 2014).
23 Lagerfeld continues an idea Christomanos developed. For the Greek teacher,
Empress Elisabeth was a reincarnation of the beautiful poetess Elizabeth Siddal,
the wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Christomanos, Tagebuchblätter, 95–6.
24 See “Karl Lagerfeld Full Show Spring Summer 1996 Paris by Fashion Channel,”
Youtube video, posted September 2, 2016. Available at: https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=TZnkxl-4oV8 (accessed November 2, 2017). It was not possible to
find out if Lagerfeld created this collection for the book.
25 Probably, the role is played by Caroline Lebar, Lagerfeld’s longstanding press
officer.
162 Sissi’s World
anachronistic Oakley designer sun-glasses, Lagerfeld has created a

postmodern angel. He may even have attempted to depict himself in
this figure, the sun-glasses a reference to his own iconic eye-wear.
With one exception, the photographs are taken en plein air, and can
be ordered into three time spans: the scene at the postcard stand at the
entrance to Achilleion is set in the present (photographs 6, 7, 10). The fig-
ures here are dressed in casual contemporary clothing and come across
as the visual dramatis personae. The second period is set in a dream from
the past, and it is here that Lagerfeld plays out his story. The third, final
level depicts a heroic, highly erotic fantasy world of Elisabeth’s imagi-
nation. The seven photographs in this section (including the title page)
are black and gold and mainly show Alex alias Achilles naked, bringing
out his full divine beauty. In the middle of the book, also in black and
gold, there is a photograph of the large Franz Matsch fresco from the
hall in Achilleion showing the triumphal procession of Achilles. It is the
only photograph depicting the interior of the palace.
Lagerfeld creates a love story between Elisabeth and the mythical
hero Achilles, whom the monarch idolized and to whom she dedicated
her villa on Corfu. Significantly, the fashion designer stages this fictive
relationship solely from the female perspective. It is Elisabeth who ima-
gines the romantic encounter; the male character is the object of her
desire. His physical beauty is consequently depicted highly seductively
in this fantasy world.
Two quotations from Fernando Pessoa’s homoerotic poem Antinous
reinforce lyrically this amorous encounter. In this English poem,
Emperor Hadrian declaims his desperate love for his deceased slave
Antinous. In an inversion of the Pygmalion myth, the classical ruler
overcomes his loss by ordering a marble statue of his lover, thus fixing
his love for all eternity.26 In real life, the historical Elisabeth also com-
missioned a statue of Achilles to be erected on the grounds of the villa.
Furthermore, she immortalizes her beloved hero in numerous raptur-
ous poems.27
The narrative is limited to Elisabeth’s arrival, several encounters
with her lover, either on a balcony, terrace, or in a hidden corner of the
26 Regarding the poem, which was neglected for a long time because of the del-
icate topic, see George Monteiro, “Fernando Pessoa, He Had His Nerve,” in
Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality, ed. Anna M. Klobucka and
Mark Sabine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 124–48; and Mark
Sabine, “‘Ever-Repositioned Mysteries’: Homosexuality and Heteronymity in
‘Antinous,’” in Embodying Pessoa, ed. Anna M. Klobucka and Mark Sabine, 149–
78.
27 See, for example, her poem “Seelenbrautfahrt,” in Hamann, Das poetische Tage-
buch, 89. It is possible the widely read fashion designer is familiar with the
poems of the Austrian Empress.
garden, and it ends with the monarch’s departure. Individual details

carry over several photographs creating the impression of a short cin-
ematic sequence (photographs 53–58). This kind of sequencing, which
makes the story more dynamic, can be traced back to Lagerfeld’s long
time admiration for silent movies and his special fascination with still
images rather than with films themselves.28
The sequences do not appear chronologically as the story is told in
medias res. The beginning—arrival and welcome—is told as a flash back
(photographs 31–32). The separation comes at the end of the book: mir-
roring her arrival, Elisabeth is seen holding her parasol (photograph 66).
Closer analysis of these photographs reveals a consistent principle of
mythologizing, a process that could be described as an alliance of myths
or mythemes, i.e. single elements of a myth.29 Three combinations are
especially striking: to begin with Lagerfeld depicts the classical myths
comparatively. He presents Elisabeth, for example, as Medusa, in a
frontal shot with a frightening but beautiful gaze (photograph 30).30 In
another photograph, she can be seen from the side, as Iphigenia looking
down longingly at the sea (photograph 62), recalling the famous paint-
ings by Alma Tadema31 and Anselm Feuerbach.32 Lagerfeld draws these
comparisons himself in his preface to the book. “Here the harsh world
of the Electra created by Richard Strauss or of the works of Max Klinger
is not evoked, but rather one of Goethe’s Iphigenia.” In contrast to the
ecstatic figure of Electra, Iphigenia, created by Goethe, symbolizes a
milder, balanced, “damned human” character. In this way, not a tragic,
but a moderate interpretation of Greek mythology constitutes the back-
ground of Lagerfeld’s story. To compare the Austrian monarch to Iphi-
genia or other classical Greek mythological heroines is not an invention
of the designer. It had already become fashionable around 1900.33
28 Lagerfeld explains, “A photographer like me acts more like a film director.”

Quoted in Strobach, Fotograf, 64. See also [Walter Smerling and Evelyn Weiss],
“Wo Traum und Wahrheit sich auf halbem Wege treffen: Walter Smerling im
Gespräch mit Evelyn Weiss,” Karl Lagerfeld, Parti pris (Göttingen: Steidl, 1998),
17–18.
29 Achim Aurnhammer calls this mythopoetic process “alliance of myths” [Myth-
enallianz]. Achim Aurnhammer, “Zum Deutungsspielraum der Ikarus-Figur in
der frühen Neuzeit,” in Mythenkorrekturen: Zu einer paradoxalen Form der Mythen-
rezeption, in Zusammenarbeit mit Wolfgang Emmerich, ed. Martin Vöhler and Bernd
Seidensticker (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 143–6.
30 David Leeming, Medusa: Die schreckliche Schöne, trans. Matthias Wolf (Berlin:
Wagenbach, 2016), 25, 54–62.
31 See the excerpt in the photography book and Christomanos, Tagebuchblätter, 156.
32 Lagerfeld made a photographic series adapting Feuerbach’s paintings. See the
exhibition Feuerbachs Musen—Lagerfelds Models, presented from February 21 to
June 15, 2014 in the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
33 This aspect is dominant in the obituaries written by Gabriele D’Annunzio, Gio-
suè Carducci, and Hermann Bahr. Maikler, Kaiserin, 165–252.
164 Sissi’s World
More innovative is Lagerfeld’s use of two other forms of mythical

constellations. On the one hand, he borrows elements from the myth of
Elisabeth itself. Irrespective of the medium, he selects individual, partly
contradictory mythemes and combines them to synthesize a new image.
On the other hand, he connects the contemporary Elisabeth myth to
other twentieth century myths in the most modern constellation.
These new approaches are especially evident in two particular pho-
tographs. Erwin Panofsky’s method of three-staged interpretation is
useful here. In a first step, there is the pre-iconographic description, i.e.
persons and objects shown on the picture must be identified. The sec-
ond step is the iconographic analysis, which explains the meaning of the
picture on the basis of literary sources. Finally, there is the iconological
interpretation. This analysis develops the symbolic content of the picture
by finding out what principles form the basis of this work, i.e. the basic
attitudes of a nation, an epoch, a class, a religion, a philosophy, and by
investigating the intention of this work of art.34 The visual analysis will
begin with a description and then concentrate on a comparative inter-
pretation between the picture and its possible sources. It finishes with a
detailed contextualization against the background of the film analysis.
The mythologizing process using elements from the Elisabeth myth
is especially evident in photograph 13.35 Here, Lagerfeld’s Elisabeth can
be seen in a pose in the right half of the frame gazing at the viewer over
her left shoulder with a mocking expression. Her eyes are lightly shaded
like those of a silent movie star. Her loosely plaited black hair reaches
down her back almost to her waist. She holds a thin, black knitted dress
to her breast, leaving her back uncovered. The black fabric contrasts
sharply with her naked, alabaster skin. The diagonal line of the dress
falling from her breast over her left upper arm down to her buttock
creates an erotic tension as the dress could apparently slip down at any
moment. Her posture insinuates a step forward which invites an erotic
interpretation; the form of her slim legs tantalizes, visible as they are
through the fabric of her dress, highlighting its transparency: a teas-
ingly simultaneous veiling and unveiling.36 In the background you can
see in a corner of the white peristyle, out of focus, two muses and a
herma. In the top left of the frame there is a black trunk of a palm tree
that corresponds to Elisabeth’s long, slim body. The two-tone coloring
of the photograph is picked up by the grey-white marble floor tiles.
34 Erwin Panofsky, “Ikonographie und Ikonologie (1939/1955),” in Ikonographie

und Ikonologie. Theorien – Entwicklung – Probleme, ed. Ekkehard Kaemmerling
(Cologne: Dumont, 1979), 207–25.
35 This illustration is associated with the photographs 40 and 41.
36 Such fabrics, also called “linen fog” [Leinennebel], were already well-known in
the ancient world. Ingrid Loschek, Reclams Mode- und Kostümlexikon (Stuttgart:
Reclam, 1999), 426.
The hair-style and posture of this new Elisabeth recall unmistakably

Winterhalter’s famous portrait, which can be detected out of focus in
the background of photograph 6.37 While Winterhalter captured Elis-
abeth on his canvas in a fleeting moment with an ingenious use of
lighting, seemingly anticipating a photographic snapshot, Lagerfeld’s
image, although equally affecting spontaneity, is composed like a paint-
ing.38 A comparison of Lagerfeld’s image with its predecessor reveals
significant differences. Lagerfeld has inverted and eroticized Winterh-
alter’s Elisabeth. He has reduced the full-body shot of the original to a
more intimate knee-length portrait. So the figure seems to be closer to
the viewer. The gossamer-thin fabric of her dress resembles the original
one; however, it is more fitted and thus more revealing. Held tentatively
in position, the dress falls in soft folds over Elisabeth’s immaculate
body, recalling the draped robes and partially clad bodies of authentic
classical statues and younger copies alike.39 Furthermore, the dress is no
longer innocently white but seductively black. With this change, Lager-
feld underlines his intention. In his preface he writes: “It is a very sen-
sual location. Everything is charged with latent eroticism.” The famous
diamond stars are missing; apart from a filigree chain around her waist,
Lagerfeld’s Elisabeth is wearing no jewelry at all. Her characteristic
plait is, however, still clearly visible, as a faint reference, in the loosely
arranged hairstyle of the modern Elisabeth.40 These changes to her hair
and dress render the photograph timeless, unhinging it from a fixed
point in time. Transcending time, Lagerfeld’s Elisabeth has become a
mythic figure.41 Winterhalter’s painting was not a typical portrait d’ap-
parat,42 and Lagerfeld’s photograph even less so, despite his inclusion
of the traditional columns. His image celebrates far more the timeless
37 Photograph 11 shows Elisabeth in a similar posture, but mirror-inverted and

enlarged.
38 “I compose a photo in exactly the same way I make a drawing [… ], but the play
of the light adds yet another dimension.” Quoted in Marcel Krenz and Chrysan-
thi Kotrouzinis, “‘Fashion, Photography, Books. That’s all’: Karl Lagerfeld,” Karl
Lagerfeld: Konkret Abstrakt Gesehen, trans. Dr. Michael Eldred (Göttingen: Steidl,
2007), np. In Lagerfeld’s photographic work Weiss recognizes “a strong, careful
structure of composition, which seems to leave nothing to chance and improvi-
sation.” Smerling and Weiss, “Traum,” 15.
39 See, for example, the sculpture Venere Italica (1819) by Antonio Canova.
40 Elisabeth’s identifying hairstyle, her complicated “Steckbrief-Frisur,” was done
by a hairdresser from the theater. It was the natural crown of her legendary
beauty. See Christomanos, Tagebuchblätter, 55–61.
41 Strobach recognizes a timeless beauty in Lagerfeld’s photographs in general.
Strobach, Fotograf, 12.
42 Gabriela Christen, “Die Bildnisse der Kaiserin Elisabeth,” in Elisabeth von Öster-
reich: Momente aus dem Leben einer Kunstfigur, Mit einem kunstgeschichtlichen
Exkurs von Gabriela Christen, ed. Juliane Vogel (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik,
1998), 164–90.
166 Sissi’s World
beauty of a woman. By depicting her immaculate body in a classical

style, the designer primarily pursues a purely aesthetic agenda.
The idea to transform the “White Starry Empress” into black was not
Lagerfeld’s. Man Ray, for example, photographed the Marquise Casati
for the Duke of Beaumont’s ball in 1930 in a black ball gown with Sisi-
stars in her hair.43 However, there was a “Queen of the Night” even
before Winterhalter created his masterpiece. A photograph from 1858
shows Virginia, Countess of Castiglione in a black gown and with a
plait both decorated with stars. Both Virginia’s gown and Elisabeth’s
tulle dress were creations designed by the Parisian couturier Charles
Frederick Worth.44
Lagerfeld’s “Black Empress,” however, derives not from a photo-
graphic predecessor, but rather from a literary source dating from the
Decadent Movement.45 Christomanos first coined her epithet “the Black
Empress” in the 1890s. After the suicide of her son, Elisabeth dressed
solely in black mourning right up until her death. Withdrawing from
virtually all of her public duties, she instead took to traveling to distant
destinations. Far from Vienna, she became increasingly introverted.
Christomanos took this melancholic behavior as an opportunity to
transform the image of the monarch into a Nietzsche- and Schopenhau-
eresque philosopher, reducing her to a “female allegory”46 of his own
intellectual development.
The third type of mythologization, the combination of the Elis-
abeth myth with other modern myths, is exemplified in photograph
66. This photograph together with two following ones make up the
final sequence of the imperial departure. Elisabeth is standing in a
commanding pose against a coastal landscape. She is wearing a white,
revealing, but not completely unbuttoned blouse. The collar is turned
43 [Man Ray], Man Ray, Photograph: Mit einer Einleitung von Jean-Hubert Martin,
trans. Bettina Adler (Munich: Schirmer-Mosel, 1982), 211 (Plate 310).
44 Regarding this “quiet scandal,” see Juliane Vogel, “The Double Skin: Imperial
Fashion in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Body of the Queen: Gender and Rule in
the Courtly World, 1500–2000, trans. Pamela Selwyn, ed. Regina Schulte (New
York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 227–31; and Michaela Lindinger, “Sisi & Sisters:
On Stars & Style,” in Fashionable Queens. Body – Power – Gender, ed. Eva Flicker
and Monika Seidl (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014), 124–6.
45 Also the six quotations written by the Symbolist poet Oscar Venceslas de Lubicz
Milosz (1877–1939) refer to the fin de siècle. The hermetic verses, taken from the
poems Aliénor, La Terre, La dernière orgie, Hymne, Lalie, and Le chant du vin have
the effect of musical accompaniment for the scenario. On Milosz see Gabriele
Schäfer, O. V. de L. Milosz, Eine Studie zur Identitäts- und Sprachkrise eines modernen
Dichters (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1991), 56–82.
46 Juliane Vogel, Elisabeth von Österreich: Momente aus dem Leben einer Kunstfigur, mit
einem kunstgeschichtlichen Exkurs von Gabriela Christen (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue
Kritik, 1998), 137.
up. The sleeves are loosely rolled up. Her black skirt is tightly fitted
around her waist but falls down from the hips into a series of pleats.
Around her neck she is wearing a fine, extremely long chain. In addi-
tion to this, there is a spoon-shaped piece of jewelry decorating the
waistband of her skirt, glittering in the sunlight. Elisabeth is holding
a black parasol in her left hand which causes a shadow to fall over her
face and upper body. She has turned her face to the left so she is in
profile. Her eyes are closed. Her chin is slightly pointing upwards. Her
right hand is placed lightly in her skirt pocket. A tall tree, out of focus,
can be discerned to the right of her. Behind her, also out of focus, are the
sea and a mountain range.
With this composition, Lagerfeld not only presents a variation of
Barrès’s description of the empress “always in black, protected by her
white parasol”; he also recalls the many photographs from the 1890s of
Elisabeth with her slight figure, dressed in black, holding her parasol.
Furthermore, other points of reference are evident in this photograph:
the image of Elisabeth standing in the Greek countryside, dressed in
black and white, one hand in her pocket, a chain around her neck, star-
ing confidently and proudly away from the viewer, recalls Man Ray’s
photograph of Coco Chanel from 1935.47 The two colors of her dress and
the chain provide further allusion to the French designer. Coco Chanel
made the elegant contrast of black and white a trademark of her fash-
ion designs,48 which she would accessorize with striking costume jew-
elry, especially paste pearl necklaces. Her signature cigarette, missing
here, appears in photograph 29, smoked by Elisabeth. This is, in fact, no
anachronism; there is historic evidence to suggest that the Empress was
indeed a smoker.49
A French quotation from the poetess Catherine Pozzi accompanies
this photograph:
Je reviverai notre grande journée,

Et cet amour que je t’avais donné.
47 Last but not least, both women are connected to each other through Romy
Schneider. With the intention of getting rid of the sugary Sissi image, Schnei-
der went to Paris in 1958, where she started her second career as an actress.
Coco Chanel supported her as a maternal friend. Justine Picardie, Chanel: Ihr
Leben, trans. Gertraude Krueger and Dörthe Kaiser (Göttingen: Steidl, 2011),
391; Michael Töteberg, Romy Schneider (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2009), 92; and Günter
Krenn, Romy Schneider: Die Biographie (Berlin: Aufbau, 2008), 157–8.
48 Lagerfeld himself made a habit of it: “I’m a man in black and white.” See
Jean-Christoph Napias and Sandrine Gulbenkian, Karl: Über die Welt und das
Leben (Hamburg: Edel, 2014), 60.
49 Hamann, Elisabeth, 134.
168 Sissi’s World
Both verses are from the poem Vale. The complete sequence reads:
Je reviverai notre grande journée,

Et cette amour que je t’avais donné.
Pour la douleur.50
In such a way, being taken out of context and without the final key
enjambment, Lagerfeld’s inclusion of these verses transforms the impe-
rial departure into an uplifting moment. Contrary to the lyrical I, whose
departure is forever leaving behind a broken love,51 Elisabeth takes
leave of the island invigorated by her liaison with her beloved hero
Achilles. This interpretation is encouraged by her confident “Chanel-
pose.”
Despite Lagerfeld’s manipulation of Pozzi’s verses, he draws an
implicit parallel between his Elisabeth and the poetess with this quo-
tation, thus conferring an existential dimension on the imperial love
affair: in her writing Pozzi primarily reflects on the position of inade-
quacy that women assume in relationships. Furthermore, in her devo-
tion to her lover Paul Valéry, she attempted to carve for herself a new
meaningful and balanced approach to living her life, a quest in which
she ultimately failed.52 Read in this context, Elisabeth’s love for Achil-
les comes across as more than an escapist fantasy; it is an alternative
approach to living out her life, one evidently more successful than Poz-
zi’s, because she as the woman is capable of ruling the relationship.
Reincarnation
In his book of photography, the comparison between Elisabeth and
Coco Chanel is only evident in an exterior attitude; Lagerfeld, however,
makes this the central theme of his short film Reincarnation. In this film,
which premiered December 1, 2014 in Salzburg for the opening of the
new Métiers d’Art collection from Chanel, Lagerfeld does not use the
elitist Elisabeth myth from the turn of the nineteenth century. Instead
he looks to the popular Sissi myth of the twentieth century, processing
50 I shall live again our great day/And relive this love that I gave you/For the
pain. Quoted in French (with two variations) and English according to Cathe-
rine Pozzi, Die sechs Gedichte. Les six poèmes. The six poems. Mit einem Essay von/
Avec un essai de/with [sic] an essay by Friedhelm Kemp, trans. Friedhelm Kemp and
Howard Fine (Göttingen: Steidl, 2002), n.p.
51 Pozzi depicts in this cosmic-erotic text her very complicated love of Paul Valéry.
See Stephanie Bung, Figuren der Liebe: Diskurs und Dichtung bei Paul Valéry und
Catherine Pozzi (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 172–8.
52 See Margot Brink, Ich schreibe, also werde ich: Nichtigkeitserfahrung und Selbstschöp-
fung in den Tagebüchern von Marie Bashkirtseff, Marie Lenéru und Catherine Pozzi
(Königstein/Taunus: Helmer, 1999), 173–84.
it in a commercial way.53 This approach to the myth is witty and playful,

as Lagerfeld explains in a comment about his film: “There is a touch
of Pop Art in it. […] It’s not meant to be a historical reconstruction or
something heavy like that. This is light and funny.”54
The Métiers d’Art show takes place once a year at a location that is
associated with Coco Chanel. Whilst holidaying in the Salzburg region
in 1954, the French fashion designer noticed the traditional jacket worn
by a liftboy at the hotel where she was staying, Hotel Schloss Mittersill.
Inspired by its sober, practical form, the fashion designer went on to
create her famous Chanel jacket, which became a symbol of the Wom-
en’s Movement in the twentieth century. This moment of inspiration, of
which there is no historical proof, is captured in Lagerfeld’s film. The
designer uses local color to inform the scene: he has the imperial couple
Empress Elisabeth and Emperor Franz Joseph appear in person, and
thus celebrates not only the reincarnation of an iconic piece of clothing,
but also the reincarnation of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.55
Salzburg is closely associated with the monarch. Elisabeth first set
foot in her future empire when she visited Salzburg on her bridal jour-
ney, and the city was also the last the Austrian Empress visited before
leaving for Switzerland, where she was murdered. This occasion is
commemorated today by the marble statue of the Empress near the
train station, complete with a poem by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach.56
53 Karl Lagerfeld, Reincarnation, with Pharrell Williams, Cara Delevingne, Ger-

aldine Chaplin, Lady Amanda Harlech, Baptiste Giabiconi, Heidi Mount,
Caroline Lebar, et al. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO4-
TV6Zckc (accessed November 1, 2016). The film was shot in the studios of Luc
Besson in Paris. See “Karl Lagerfeld präsentiert neuesten Chanel-Film,” Yahoo
Style. Available at: https://de.style.yahoo.com/blogs/mode/karl-lagerfeld-
pr%C3%A4sentiert-neuesten-chanel-film-130427737.html (accessed October 1,
2016).
54 Quoted in Miles Socha, “Karl Lagerfeld Unveils Latest Chanel Film,” WWD.
Available at: http://wwd.com/eye/people/sisi-delevingne-8042428/ (accessed
October 1, 2016). The term “Pop Art,” used by the English critic Lawrence Allo-
way, means the alienation, parody, or the fetishizing of a trivial object into a
conspicuous, mostly funny object of art, which is aimed at a wide public. For
that, it must be cheaply producible and lightly consumable. Will Gompertz, Was
gibt’s zu sehen? 150 Jahre Moderne Kunst auf einen Blick, trans. Sofia Blind (Cologne:
Dumont, 2013), 310.
55 In the making of the film, Lagerfeld talks about three reincarnations: the rein-
carnation of the famous Chanel jacket, the reincarnation of the imperial couple,
and the reincarnation of the mood of the country in the early fifties. See Karl
Lagerfeld, The Making of “Reincarnation” (Documentary in French and English).
3:21 minutes. With statements from Geraldine Chaplin, Cara Delevingne, Phar-
rell Williams, and Karl Lagerfeld. Paris, 2014. Available at: http://chanel-news.
chanel.com/de_DE/home.html?_charset_=UTF-8&q=reincarnation (accessed
October 3, 2016).
56 Maikler, Kaiserin, 403–14.
170 Sissi’s World
Furthermore, a ball celebrating Sisi’s engagement to the Emperor is

supposed to have taken place in Schloss Leopoldskron, the location
for the Chanel fashion show on December 2, 2014.57 It is remarkable
that the permanently absent Empress, who firmly rejected her role as
“mother of the nation,” is today regarded more than ever as the person-
ification of Austria.
In the film Geraldine Chaplin plays Coco Chanel.58 The singer-song-
writer Pharrell Williams and top model Cara Delevingne have two roles
each: by day they are a liftboy and a waitress in a rustic hotel in the Alps
while at night they play the imperial couple. Just as he did in his book
AXIΛΛEION, Lagerfeld tells the story on the two levels of reality and
dream, which serve as the structure for the short film. Four sequences
can be observed:
In the opening credits, while the title and names of the main actors
and director roll, the festively lit yet deserted dining room of the rustic
hotel blends into the hotel lobby as the camera zooms out. To the left
and right of the entrance Winterhalter’s portraits of the imperial couple
from 1865 are revealed. A close up of the faces in the portraits follows in
such detail that it defamiliarizes them to the point of caricature. Lager-
feld has not cast his actors to duplicate the historical figures; instead,
conversely, he presents these historical personalities with features char-
acteristic of his actors. Sisi now looks down at the audience provoca-
tively with striking eyebrows (Figure 7.1), while Franz Joseph is now
dark skinned and clean-shaven. This kind of visual manipulation of
historical authenticity distances the audiences as well as making them
smile. It also shows Lagerfeld’s freedom to think outside of the box in a
revolutionary way. He obviously loves to wake up his public, breaking
with traditions and conventions.
The second sequence, in which the main story line begins, looks
back from the present to the past of the early 1950s. The bustle of the
daily routine is evident in the same rooms of the hotel; at lunchtime,
the dining room is full of guests, and the staff has its hands full. In
the lobby guests are coming and going, one of them is Coco Chanel;
as the liftboy comes into view, soft music plays, introducing the third
sequence.
Set at exactly three minutes to midnight, this sequence thematizes
the witching hour. In blue filtered light, denoting the dream world,
Sisi and Franz descend from their gold-framed portraits to sing and
57 See “Trachten als Inspiration für Karl Lagerfeld,” Vogue. Available at: http://
www.vogue.de/fashion-shows/designer/chanel-in-salzburg-trachten-als-in-
spiration-fuer-karl-lagerfeld#galerie/13 (accessed October 1, 2016).
58 She already played this role in Lagerfeld’s Chanel film The Return (2013).
Figure 7.1 Karl Lagerfeld, Reincarnation: Lagerfeld’s Winterhalter

Sisi 1.
dance together (Figure 7.2). The tones of a waltz apparently come from
a musical box, acoustically emphasizing the magical atmosphere of this
sequence, which makes up the center piece of the film. The next morn-
ing, which fades in at the end of the dance scene, we can see the foyer
being cleaned. The liftboy awakes and takes up his position. The first
guest to come out of the lift is Coco Chanel. She asks him about his
jacket, which she had noticed the day before. As she hears that there is
only one made for him, she decides to make one for herself, too.
In this short film, Lagerfeld initially seems to make only loose, playful
references to the Elisabeth myth. However, this reception is not merely
“light and funny.”59 The first detail the audience sees of the waitress,
59 Lagerfeld’s films are mostly short, but they are not “slovenly, fast acts,” as the
designer makes clear. Quoted in “Karl Lagerfeld präsentiert neuesten Chanel-
Film.”
172 Sissi’s World
Figure 7.2 Karl Lagerfeld, Reincarnation: Sisi and Franz dance.
Sisi reincarnate, is a tattoo on her neck, a likely unusual feature for a

hotel waitress in 1950s Austria. Lagerfeld’s inclusion of this detail is
intentional: on one level, it functions as ironic re-familiarization—the
audience should recognizes Cara in the waitress rather than Elisabeth—
on a second level, the historical relevance of the tattoo will register with
Sisi experts: as an expression of her love for the sea, Her Imperial Maj-
esty had an anchor tattooed onto her shoulder in 1888, much to the cha-
grin of her husband.60 Thus, Lagerfeld establishes a close link between
waitress and Empress. Furthermore, the girl’s brunette plait directly
recalls the monarch. To strengthen this allusion, in the second sequence,
the waitress stands directly underneath the Winterhalter portrait and,
bearing a Cheshire cat smile, looks over her left shoulder into the foyer,
mirroring her original in oils.
Finally, at the stroke of the witching hour, the “Fairy Empress” appears
in full costume wearing the tulle ball gown designed by Worth. Despite
the truthful re-creation of the dress, it still feels more like a prop, which
could certainly be intentional in this pop film. It seems to be the costume
of a fairy living in a dream world, not the gala dress of a real monarch.
Also significant is the absence of the diamond stars, missing from the
opulent hair arrangement of the Empress incarnate. Instead, her hair is
60 Marie Valerie von Österreich, Das Tagebuch der Lieblingstochter von Kaiserin Elis-
abeth: 1878–1899, eds. Martha and Horst Schad (Munich: Langen Müller, 2004),
156.
decorated with considerably bigger edelweiss petals (Figure 7.3). These

are a reference to Lagerfeld’s new collection premiered in Salzburg: this
rare alpine flower features prominently in the collection, for example
on socks and shoes. Lagerfeld does use the typical Sisi-stars in his col-
lection. However, they no longer shine from white dresses but black,
slim-cut ones, which are then combined with white stockings. Lager-
feld has also added them to black and white striped jackets and skirts.
These black fashion pieces are not just an inverted reference to Sisi, but
also pay homage to Chanel’s Little Black Dress, which, along with her
famous jacket, has achieved iconic status in the fashion world. Moreo-
ver, we find again the contrast of blacks and whites, typical of Chanel.
Lagerfeld projects a symbolic unification of these contradictions
onto the waitress. He does not do this temporally to establish her age
(young/white versus old/black), but instead morally, to describe her
split-character. On the one hand, she is friendly, slipping her workmate
a secret beer while he is on duty. On the other hand, her disobedience
turns into spitefulness when, for no good reason, she pushes another
waiter from behind causing him to trip with a tray in his hands. These
two scenes are initially confusing, but Lagerfeld’s intention becomes
clear once the historical context is clarified. The contradictory behav-
ior and the split-personality of the waitress recall the rumors of the
Empress’s own contradictory behavior spread about her during her life-
time. On the one hand, Elisabeth was sensitive and thoughtful, cross-
ing class boundaries to uphold her principles and sense of fairness.61
On the other hand, she was incapable of forming a close relationship
Figure 7.3 Karl Lagerfeld, Reincarnation: Lagerfeld’s Winterhalter Sisi 2.
61 Hamann, Elisabeth, 62.

174 Sissi’s World
with either Franz Joseph or her two eldest children. The suicide of the
Crown Prince, for which many at court ultimately held her responsible,
can be seen as the tragic climax of her egotism.62 Refusing the role of
an empress and wife, Elisabeth tried to liberate herself from the hated
duties. She desired nothing but a self-determined life.
Despite this subtle criticism, Lagerfeld creates another ideal dream
world in his film. This can broadly be interpreted as a message of sal-
vation, appropriate for the opening (the film premiered in December).
Sisi and Franz Joseph return to the 1950s relegated to the lowly roles
of waitress and liftboy. They can only recall their imperial existence as
dream. Despite their modest status, they continue nevertheless to be
distinguishable from everyone else, because they are able to perceive
the beauty of the world. This aspect is expressed systematically in
Pharrell’s song CC the World, which he wrote especially for the film and
sings as a duet with Cara. Pharell and Cara highlight in the song the
link between beauty, seeing and “Sisi”/“CC.”
Could she be the girl to help you see

See the world?
The rhetorically enigmatic ambiguity of the pun in the song’s title

and text has echoes of the Baroque, which loved to play astutely with
stylistic devices and acquired perceptive audiences. The homophone
“CC” stands for Coco Chanel; her two initials intertwined are a symbol
of her fashion house’s corporate identity.63 This consequential use of
“CC” imagery is evident right down to the dance movements of Phar-
rell and Cara; their intertwined arms and legs mirroring the two Cs.
Furthermore, in English “CC” is pronounced [si: si:]. Throughout
the song Hudson Kroenig, Lagerfeld’s six-year-old godson, who took
part in both the film and the fashion show, rhythmically interjects “CC,”
respectively “Sisi,” thus recalling both icons, Coco Chanel and Sisi.
The symbolism can be developed even further. “CC” can also be
understood as the command to “see | See,” thus picking up on the
song’s theme. Its six short lines present a definition of Beauty no less.
Beauty is hidden within people and only finds release when other peo-
ple see it—through loving eyes. So beauty exists solely in the eyes of
the loving beholder. The visual sense, seeing, opens up the path to the
realization of beauty, whereby beauty here is enlightenment. This con-
nection between love, beauty, and enlightenment recalls the classical
definition of love, first described by Plato in Symposium: “Eros […] is
62 Haman, Elisabeth, 563.

63 Alfons Kaiser, “CC meets k.u.k.,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Decem-
ber 7, 2014.
love of beauty […].”64 Only the one who can love beauty can progress
on the path of enlightenment to perceive the divine in this earthly realm
already. Love and beauty thus allow individuals to transcend the every-
day to a divine level of being.
Lagerfeld uses a multimedia video clip to capture the meaning of
Pharrell’s song. In the radiance of their attractive beauty, Cara and Phar-
rell, alias Sisi and Franz Joseph, begin to dance with each other. Looking
deep into each dancer’s eyes, the camera moves increasingly from full
shot to close ups and extreme close ups, edited as shot-reverse-shots,
between Sisi and Franz, thus constructing their dance as a silent dia-
logue. This mise-en-scène of their smitten looks renders the sensuous
desire between a man and a woman especially tangible. In doing so,
Lagerfeld eroticizes the Elisabeth myth once more. However, he depicts
the lovers’ relationship from a clearly male perspective. In contrast to
her actively controlling role in her previous fantasy as Elisabeth, here,
as Sisi, the figure of the Empress is assigned the conventional role of
female muse, who inspires her male creator, yet creates nothing herself.
This is why she simply echoes the Emperor’s words in the song, rather
than singing her own lyrics. Furthermore, significantly only the liftboy
is seen waking up the next morning, not the waitress, which suggests
that the dream is a male dream and not a female one, unlike the dream
in the photography book. This passive characterization of Elisabeth is
undermined, however, by the figure of Coco Chanel. In the day time
sequence, the setting for reality, Mademoiselle Chanel exploits male-
ness, personified here in the liftboy, as a source of inspiration. Here the
French fashion designer functions as an exception to prove the rule.
Conventional gender roles also dictate the choice of partner. While
the Empress dreams of an illicit affair with a half-god lover in the pho-
tography book, thus transforming the relationship into something
fabled and bizarre, here, as Sisi, she is seen at the side of her legitimate
partner, who is, however, dark-skinned.65 This somewhat ironic ideal-
ization of a traditional gender relation finds remarkable resonance in
photographic material accompanying the film. It includes a black and
white photograph of the Emperor together with the Empress. The pic-
ture supplies something missing from history. Although their relation-
ship was loving, their marriage was difficult from the very beginning.
Over the years, the couple grew estranged with the aging Elisabeth
even trying to make her husband take a lover so that she could retreat
from imperial duties and family life without feeling guilty.
64 Platon, Das Gastmahl oder Von der Liebe, trans. Kurt Hildebrandt (Stuttgart: Rec-
lam, 2001), 76.
65 The relationship between the liftboy and the waitress is not evident. At least,
both are service personnel and therefore belong to the same social class.
176 Sissi’s World
Every ideal marriage is crowned by a child, and also in the short

film an infant plays an important role. Already in the opening titles
there is—between the extreme close ups of Winterhalter’s portraits of
the Emperor and the Empress—a shot of an oil painting depicting a
blond boy. This boy is unmistakably Hudson Kroenig. It is not clear,
if the painting is based on an original source, so it was possibly made
especially for the film in the style of Winterhalter.66 A contemporary
photograph of Crown Prince Rudolf has survived which shows him in
a similar posture and outfit. However, he was three years younger than
Hudson when the photograph was taken.67 The blond boy completes
Lagerfeld’s image of the ideal family. Father, mother, and child also fea-
tured in shots for his photo campaign for his fashion collection, though
not in their imperial outfits, but all three in the latest Chanel fashion, as
premiered at the fashion show.
To conclude, Lagerfeld updates the Elisabeth myth by placing it in
a new, at times daring, context, in which the combination of the Elis-
abeth myth and the myth surrounding Coco Chanel plays a key role. In
the case of his short film, Lagerfeld could easily have been motivated
by pragmatic interests behind his clever marketing strategy; as the
designer himself knows: “Sisi sells.”68 By setting this accent, the fashion
Czar develops the Elisabeth myth by giving it his own distinctive touch.
The analysis of the photography book and the short film has revealed
some obvious similarities. The erotic fiction that Lagerfeld develops in
both his book and film is based on historical material, yet ultimately
expresses the designer’s own attitude and world view.69 Both works
present an idealized love between a beautiful woman and an attractive
man. This love is located in a fictitious dream world, thus presenting an
aesthetic alternative to the real world.70
But aside from these common features, we can identify two very dif-
ferent images of Elisabeth, comparing book with film. All the while,
66 Winterhalter did not paint the Austrian couple’s children, but he portrayed the
family of Queen Victoria at regular intervals. Helga Kessler Aurisch, “Der vol-
lendete Hofmaler,” in Franz Xaver Winterhalter: Maler im Auftrag Ihrer Majestät,
ed. Helga Kessler Aurisch, Laure Chabanne, Tilmann von Stockhausen, and
Mirja Straub (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2015), 21.
67 Brigitte Hamann, Kronprinz Rudolf: Ein Leben (Munich: Piper, 2006), 26.
68 Josef Rohrer, Sissi in Meran: Kleine Fluchten einer Kaiserin (Vienna: Folio Verlag,
2008), 10.
69 Dieter Ronte, “‘Parti pris’: Die Zukunft im Rückblick,” in Karl Lagerfeld: Parti pris
(Göttingen: Steidl, 1998), 8.
70 Lagerfeld confesses: “I’m not blind. I know what happens in the world. I know,
it is terrible. [… ] I build my own reality. I have created something for me, so I
can handle my life quite well. I enjoy the luxury of being the center of my own,
intact world.” Quoted in Strobach, Fotograf, 61. See also Smerling and Weiss,
“Traum,” 15, and Ronte, “Parti pris,” 9–10.
Lagerfeld has been a great observer and “reader” of the world. In his works
he always reflects the “mood of the times,”71 and therefore it is obvious that
over the course of almost twenty years the symbolic meaning of the histor-
ical figure of the Austrian Empress must have changed. So both romantic
utopias created by Lagerfeld are strongly influenced by the times of their
conception. Traces of the 1990s are clearly evident in AXIΛΛEION. A woman
who chooses to have an illicit affair with a hero from Greek mythology in a
villa on Corfu, which she visits sporadically, belongs to the women’s move-
ment of the late twentieth century. “Autonomy,” “self-determination,” and
“creativity” are slogans from this era.72 It is not so surprising that above all
Empress Elisabeth has become a role model who expresses modern female
longings and desires; her attempt to live her own life, her melancholy, her
cult status as a beauty and her wanderlust predated these contemporary
concerns preoccupying so many women today.73
The short film offers a very different version of Elisabeth. In this
dream world, the ideal is not an independent woman, but instead the
idyll of the Happy Family, whose perfection borders on kitsch.74 Sisi is
once more united with her legitimate partner, her loving husband. A
son completes the ideal family. Such a traditional image of gender roles
is currently back in fashion. As the sociologist Cornelia Koppetsch has
observed, the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen a return to
conservative values. Traditional role models in marriage and family life
are experiencing a renaissance in these times of uncertainty. The desire
for comfort, stability, and security offered by family life makes it a more
attractive option than a career outside the home.
By using the two characteristic images of the Empress, one could say:
the “White Fairy,” the one-dimensional, popular version of the myth,
who invites her beholders to rapturous fantasies, has today supplanted
the “Black Empress,” the complex manifestation of the Elisabeth myth,
which stimulates the viewer’s mind in disturbing ways.
71 Olivier Saillard, “The Studio in Rue de Lille,” in Karl Lagerfeld: Visions of Fashion.
Photographs, Palazzo Pitti, Firenze (Göttingen: Steidl, 2016), np.
72 Jean-Claude Kaufmann, Singlefrau und Märchenprinz: Über die Einsamkeit mod-
erner Frauen, trans. Daniela Böhmler (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH,
2002), 41–2.
73 Concerning the parallels between the Empress and the image of woman in the
1990s, see Lisa Fischer, Schattenwürfe in die Zukunft: Kaiserin Elisabeth und die
Frauen ihrer Zeit (Vienna: Böhlau, 1998), 185–96.
74 Weiss summarizes Lagerfeld’s photographic work as follows: “That which fas-
cinates me more and more in his photographic work, is the consequence and the
courage; he is looking for his ideals, for perfection and beauty, which stand the
test of time. These are ideals which scarcely anyone risks pronouncing today;
Lagerfeld firmly goes against the current. The perfection he aims at is absolutely
old-fashioned today.” Smerling and Weiss, “Traum,” 20.
178 Sissi’s World
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Eight
Sissi, the Chinese Princess:
A Timely and Versatile Post-Mao
Icon
Fei-Hsien Wang and Ke-chin Hsia
“We Want to See Sissi!”

“Shuo zhongwen ma (Speak Chinese)?” A young Chinese couple
stopped us in front of the Wiener Staatsoper in the summer of 2006.
Before we could respond, they asked another question: “Do you know
how to go to the Hofburg? We want to see Sissi!” Since 2004, we have
found ourselves repeatedly engaging in what is essentially the same
conversation with different Chinese tourists when we are in Vienna.
Although some also want to know where to find a bowl of rice for lunch
in the First District, most seem to have only one goal in mind: to “see”
Sissi.1
We would like to thank Maura Hametz, Heidi Schlipphacke, and the anon-
ymous reader for their generous feedback and suggestions. We also want to
thank Guo-Juin Hong and his Beijing colleagues for sending us several Chinese
sources.
1 The ultra-nationalist official Chinese newspaper Global Times proudly reports
that the Austrian tourism industry has noticed the Chinese tourists’ keen inter-
est in Sissi/Xixi and begun to tailor its promotional efforts accordingly. See Asa
Butcher, “Sissi Fuels China’s Growing Love for Vienna,” Global Times, Novem-
ber 5, 2015, available at: http://gbtimes.com/life/sissi-fuels-chinas-grow-
ing-love-vienna (accessed May 30, 2017). Just a few years earlier Gerd Kaminski,
the erudite pioneering scholar of Austro-Chinese relations, did not mention
Sissi/Xixi at all in analyzing the rapidly increasing number of visits to and
spending in Austria by Chinese tourists since the early 2000s. In fact, in his oth-
erwise insightful comments on the general post-Mao perceptions and images of
Austria (das Österreichbild) in China, Sissi is entirely absent. Gerd Kaminski,
Von Österreichern und anderen Chinesen (Vienna: ÖGCF, 2011), 391–398. This may
have something to do with Kaminski’s focus on official and semi-official inter-
actions when he discusses post-Mao Austro-Chinese relations.
182 Sissi’s World
To Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese like us, these Chinese tourists’ sin-

gle-minded focus on Sissi/Empress Elisabeth of Austria is both intrigu-
ing and somewhat mystifying. Sissi is rarely if ever regarded as the top
Austrian attraction in our popular culture; classical music, Vienna itself,
and the Salzkammergut’s landscape would be ranked ahead of her. The
cinematic Sissi trilogy (1955–1957) is known in Taiwan, but primarily to
the generations preceding ours. When one of us asked a Chinese col-
league about this surprising Sissi phenomenon in China, her eyes lit
up at the mere mention of the name. “Oh, Sissi!” she exclaimed, and
transformed instantaneously from a sober academic to an excited fan.
“Yes, of course everyone loves her in China,” she said. “You know how
many times I have watched the trilogy? She is the princess I’ve adored
since my childhood. Tell me more about Sissi!”
This essay is our attempt to more systematically document and
analyze the post-Mao obsession with Sissi/Xixi in China. We want to
answer the question of how and why an Austrian Empress and, more
accurately, the fictionalized depiction of her in the 1950s film trilogy
starring Romy Schneider became such a popular icon in China after the
mid-1980s. Our effort to solve the puzzle begins with the film trilogy’s
entry into China in the age of “Reform and Opening Up,” when the
cinematic (Romy Schneider) Sissi established her dominance in defin-
ing what is desirable in matters “European” and began to serve as a
central reference point as well as a role model to many in China. We
use popular writings, images, and company websites found through
China’s leading search engine Baidu (the Chinese equivalent to Google)
and the microblogging site Sina Weibo (the Chinese equivalent to Twit-
ter), and examine many popular accounts and journalistic as well as
academic works in print to survey the diverse, often unexpected, and
sometimes peculiar Chinese receptions, adoration, and manipulation
of Sissi/Xixi.2 We end this exploration with a reflection on Sissi/Xixi’s
career in the ever-changing contemporary China.
Our contention is that it is the fictional cinematic Sissi, based on
the Ernst Marischka-directed trilogy, that has left a deep and lasting
impression on the Chinese mind. Neither has the historical Empress
Elisabeth, nor have other long-standing Sissi legends achieved compa-
rable influence. Embraced enthusiastically by Chinese audiences, the
cinematic Sissi has effectively morphed into a Chinese Princess Xixi.
The latter possesses attributes and qualities that have much more to
do with what her Chinese fans want to see in her than with what the
historical Elisabeth or even the cinematic Romy Schneider–Sissi may
2 It is worth noting that the authors of these Sissi-themed popular writings and
blogposts are predominantly women. We suspect, but cannot prove, that the
majority of Sissi/Xixi’s most ardent Chinese fans and admirers are women, too.
Sissi, the Chinese Princess 183
have embodied. We therefore make a distinction, whenever possible,

between Sissi and her Chinese incarnation, Princess Xixi (the Chi-
nese insist on calling her Xixi gongzhu, Princess Xixi, even though
Empress/Queen Elisabeth was officially a Bavarian duchess before her
marriage and only a granddaughter of a Bavarian king). However, we
often are forced to resort to the clumsy construction Sissi/Xixi by her
Chinese fans’ unreflective conflation of the historical, the cinematic,
and the locally perceived/created figures of Sissi, and especially when
her putative qualities are alluded to or manipulated. In many cases we
really cannot separate the historical or cinematic Sissi from the Chinese
Xixi. It is surely an illustration of the mythologized Sissi’s cross-cul-
tural mobility and malleability under favorable circumstances. It also
allows us to observe how the Chinese reconstructed (and continue to
reconstruct) their images of Europe and the wider world after the Cul-
tural Revolution.
Sissi Came to China and Became Xixi

The 1955 film Sissi (Marischka, Austria) was first introduced to the
audience in mainland China in 1985/1986, and it was an instant sensa-
tion. The Chinese audience seemed to care little about the fact that the
film was already thirty years old. For the Chinese, the romance between
the beautiful and free-spirited Elisabeth and the young and handsome
emperor, the “imperial” splendor created by the film’s lavish sets and
costumes, and the foreign yet somehow familiar story of an old empire
that was no more (and most of these cast in a rather positive light) were
truly eye-opening. The Chinese audiences had never seen such things
on screen before or, at the very least, had not seen them depicted in film
in more than a generation.
China was in a cinema fever in the 1980s. A combination of extreme
restriction on non-propaganda films during the Cultural Revolution
(from 1967 to 1977) and a sudden influx of new works (both Chinese
and foreign) after 1978 fed a huge and long-suppressed appetite.3 The
Chinese appreciation of foreign films has had a long history dating
back to the early twentieth century. In the 1930s and 1940s, moviegoers
in urban centers enjoyed a cosmopolitan cinematic culture as Holly-
wood and European productions were introduced to China with lit-
tle time lag.4 After the establishment of the People’s Republic (PRC) in
3 For the structural shift in China’s filmscape in the 1980s, see Chris Berry, Postso-
cialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: A Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution
(New York: Routledge, 2004), and Zhang Yingjin, Chinese National Cinema (New
York: Routledge, 2004), 226–239.
4 For a general overview of foreign films in early-20th century China, see Zhang
Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 42–88.
184 Sissi’s World
1949, films from the USSR, Eastern Europe, Algeria and other “socialist
brother countries” replaced the “reactionary” and “bourgeois” Holly-
wood fare (itself a symbol of Western imperialism) as the mainstay of
a new socialist cinema culture. Revolution, war, love for one’s nation,
and the oppressed people’s struggle against feudal and/or capitalist
exploitation became the main themes Chinese audiences saw treated
on the big screen.
But cinema itself, as a form of art and entertainment, was under
attack during the Cultural Revolution which, according to Chairman
Mao, would destroy all the remains of the old civilization and the
“bourgeois elements” and then usher in truly socialist cultural values.5
Most Chinese films made before 1967 were banned. Film production
came almost to a standstill. Many movie theaters were closed, because
there were few “correct” films to be shown. The domestic film indus-
try was only revived gradually after 1978. Under the banner of “open-
ing-up,” foreign films, especially those from Japan, the United States,
and Western Europe previously seen as “cultural toxins” from the evil
capitalist world, were made available to Chinese audiences again.
Nonetheless, the quantity and origins of the foreign films allowed into
China after 1978 were (and still are) strictly controlled. Their themes
and genres were carefully selected. And most of them were older (or
“classic”) films produced between the 1950s and the 1970s. For a society
eager to “catch up” and “make up for” what it had missed during the
Mao years, however, these films were a crucial and invaluable window
to the outside world. Moviegoers devoured films screened in theaters
or at their workplaces. Unsurprisingly and inevitably, the Chinese audi-
ence sometimes took cinematic representations and fictional accounts
at their face value due to a lack of alternative or reliable sources of
information.6 The Sissi trilogy’s reception in China is an illuminating
example.
5 On the history of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, see Roderick Mac-
Farquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006) and Frank Dikötter, The Cul-
tural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976 (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2016).
6 For example, when the kongfu film The Shaolin Temple (Hsin-Yen Chang, Hong
Kong, starring a very young Jet Li) was shown in China in 1982, it set off a
martial arts craze among young people. Believing that the Buddhist monks in
the Shaolin Temple were, as the film’s story went, masters of ancient Chinese
martial arts, some fans went to the temple in the Henan Province and wanted to
become their martial arts pupils. See “Martial Arts Fever Sweeps China off Its
Feet,” New York Times, September 12, 1982, available at: http://www.nytimes.
com/1982/09/12/world/martial-arts-fever-sweeps-china-off-its-feet.html
(accessed July 14, 2017). It is said that visitors to the Shaolin Temple increased
fifteenfold after the film was shown.
Sissi introduced herself to the PRC audience at an opportune

moment. Sissi (1955) was selected in 1985 to be dubbed into Chinese
by the Shanghai Dubbing Studio and screened in theaters nationwide.
After Sissi’s huge success, The Young Empress (1956) and Fateful Years of
An Empress (1957) were shown in China in the following year. Multiple
Chinese sources claim that the Sissi trilogy achieved an aggregate view-
ership of 800 million (!) in the mid-1980s.7 Why was the Sissi trilogy so
popular? The answer to this question also helps explain the extraordi-
nary Chinese obsession with Sissi/Xixi.
As mentioned earlier, after almost four decades of political cinema
or no cinema at all, Sissi represented a new genre: romance. Love story
for love’s or at least entertainment’s sake had previously been frowned
upon, and for some time it was even a taboo because of the genre’s
negative association with condemned bourgeois decadence. Sissi was
unabashedly and a politically about romantic love, and an aristocratic/
royal (feudal) one at that. It was one of the earliest Western romances
(with a happy end, no less) made available to Chinese audiences in the
Reform Era.8 It was also the first and a literal “prince and princess living
happily ever after” film—with no irony or overt criticism intended, as
Chinese fans understood it—Chinese audiences could enjoy in more
than three decades.9 The unique circumstances placed the protagonist
in the film, Romy Schneider–Sissi, in an unusually advantageous spot-
light.
Being possibly the first positive and likeable European princess
appearing in a love story on screen in a long while, Sissi offered a new
model and a different point of reference for the Chinese audience. In
an era when old beliefs and frames of reference of the strident revolu-
tionary years were shaken, re-evaluated, or even reversed, Sissi showed
an imperial household, a monarchy, and European high society and
7 For example, “Dang nian quanmin zhuipeng de Xixi gongzhu ta you huilai
la!” (The Princess Xixi, Beloved by the Entire Nation, Is Back!) Sohu, March 29,
2016, available at: http://www.sohu.com/a/66696078_348746 (accessed May
29, 2017), and “Xin Tiane Bao yu Xixi gongzhu xi li xi wai na xie shi” (Neu-
schwanstein Castle and Princess Xixi, On and Beyond the Silver Screen), iYouth
guoji yingdui iiaoyu (iYouth Study Abroad Service), April 14, 2016, available at:
http://weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show?id=2309403964237801208314&mod=-
zwenzhang?comment=1 (accessed June 1, 2017).
8 Tan Hui, Zhongguo yizhi dianying shi (A History of Dubbed Films in China) (Bei-
jing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2014), 112–113.
9 Of course, the trilogy is actually much richer and more complex than that. But
the Chinese commentators and audiences alike seem to read the films mostly in
a straightforward, literal way that focuses on the glamor and the romance. For
an analysis that teases out the complexity of the trilogy, see Heidi Schlipphacke,
“Melancholy Empress: Queering Empire in Ernst Marischka’s Sissi Films,”
Screen 51, no. 3 (2010): 232–255.
186 Sissi’s World
court culture in a splendid and even positive light. The aristocrats and
royals are not the oppressors to be overthrown; they are likeable and
sincere people with real, relatable emotions worthy of sympathy and,
in some cases, admiration. Magnificent palaces, luxurious decors, and
gorgeous dresses are not evidence of the hated class exploitation; they
are objects to be marveled at and even longed for. In short, the film
Sissi was screened at the right time: many in China were ready for new
values and a different vision for the future, if not a different worldview
altogether. Sissi the cinematic figure was catapulted to the center of the
imagination of many who were looking for new role models.10
Another reason why the Sissi trilogy quickly won over Chinese
audiences’ hearts is that the films’ basic stories are not entirely alien
to them. Chinese audiences could easily relate to the three films’ plots
because, for example, love at first sight (a main theme of Sissi) as well
as the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law conflicts (a main theme in
The Young Empress and Fateful Years of An Empress) are also common
motifs in traditional Chinese dramas and popular literature.11 The audi-
ence can draw on its own knowledge to comprehend the new stories.
Sissi, after all, is both new and readily assimilable into a set of staple
characters many Chinese people know well from the local literary and
popular traditions.
According to many Chinese fans, it is Sissi/Xixi’s personality and
many admirable qualities that really made them fall in love with a
foreign princess. These qualities elevated her status to an icon wor-
thy of idolization and emulation. In magazine articles (both popular
and academic) and blogposts about Sissi/Xixi, we repeatedly find the
following descriptions: she was a legendary beauty with a noble soul;
she was elegant, fair, brave, faithful, and kind. Born in a royal family
10 Anthropologist Louisa Schein observes that in the 1980s and the early 1990s, the
white Western woman, often in her sexualized representations (“pinup calen-
dars, condom wrappers, panty hose packages, department store mannequins”),
was “voraciously” consumed in the Chinese popular culture. Schein argues that
the white Western woman occupied a position of otherness or alterity that was
“simultaneously an object of longing and a symbol of lack. She was what …
China did not have.” The cinematic Sissi is a wholesome and more sophisticated
figure, but her popularity may also have benefited from a broader fetish. Louisa
Schein, “The Consumption of Color and the Politics of White Skin in Post-Mao
China,” Social Text 41 (1994): 147.
11 The relationship between Sissi and Archduchess Sophie is a favorite theme in
the Chinese discussion of Sissi/Xixi. It is especially popular among married
female fans. A few examples: Yu Tao, “Xixi de hunyin beiju” (The Tragedy of Sis-
si’s Marriage), Hunyin yu jiangkang (Marriage and Health) 10 (1998: 55; Lu Hui-
jun, “Zhenshi yu tonghua de juli: Fulanci huangdi han Xixi gongzhu” (Between
Reality and Fairytale: Emperor Franz and Princess Sissi/Xixi), in her Aiqing de
lishi (A History of Love) (Beijing: Shiyou gongye chubanshe, 2006).
and married into an imperial household, she nevertheless remained

a free-spirited and peace-loving “girl (sic)” who treasured “equality,”
“freedom,” and “the people.”12
Placing these descriptions of Sissi/Xixi in the context of the “nat-
ural femininity” discourse’s re-emergence in China since the 1980s,13
one could see how the Chinese fans project their own values and imag-
inations of the ideal woman onto Sissi/Xixi. While praising her femi-
nine beauty, her devotion to love and the family, and her support for
her husband’s “career,” Sissi/Xixi’s Chinese fans do not forget to bring
up some of her qualities they considered compatible with the Chinese
socialist morality. To the Chinese fans, her love for nature, equality, and
freedom and her dislike of the court strictures are evidence of her “pro-
gressive” character. Sissi/Xixi is often portrayed as the “people’s prin-
cess/people’s empress” in China, and the cinematic Sissi’s interactions
with common people and her concern for the rights of the Hungarians
are highlighted.14 The tension between Sissi and her mother-in-law is
frequently interpreted as a “modern-minded” woman’s resistance to
and protest against Vienna’s “authoritarian,” “spiritless,” and “corrupt”
old imperial court.15 In short, she was beautiful inside and out and her
virtues transcended political, cultural, and even temporal divides.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire also gave Sissi/Xixi an advantage in
being simultaneously European, undeniably royal (feudal), and accept-
able as a role model in the ideologically still anti-imperialist, anti-feu-
dal, and anti-Western China of the 1980s. The Austro-Hungarian Empire
may be very distant and unfamiliar, but this distance made it a “safer”
monarchy to admire. As research of the 1980s “Culture Fever” in China
points out, when Chinese intellectuals became enthusiastic in employ-
ing Western social and philosophical theories to re-examine China’s past
12 For example, Huang Wei, “Zhenshi de Xixi gongzhu: Yi ge bu qingyuan de

huanghou” (The Real Princess Sissi/Xixi: An Unwilling Empress), Guojia renwen
lishi (National Humanities and History) 1 (2015): 102–107. Du Pongshou, “Xixi,
rensheng rou zhi ru chu jian” (Sissi/Xixi, As We Meet for the First Time), Youpin
(Excellence and Quality), 12 (2011): 294–295.
13 Tani Barlow, “Politics and Protocols of funü: (Un)Making National Woman,”
in Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State, ed. Christina K. Gilmartin
(Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1994); Joanna McMillan, Sex, Sci-
ence and Morality in China (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4–7, 18–23.
14 For example, Gao Guanzhong, “Yingmu nei wai de Xixi gongzhu” (Princess
Sissi/Xixi: On and Beyond the Silver Screen), Jinrong bolan (Financial Overview)
12 (2016): 28–29; and Ji Junliang, “Meili yongcun de Xixi gongzhu” (The Eter-
nal Beauty, Princess Sissi/Xixi), Danying wenxue (Cinematic Literature) 5 (2011):
107–108.
15 Xie Hongguang and Yang Fanfan, “Lun Xixi gongzhu de wei chongtu” (On
Micro-conflicts in Princess Sissi/Xixi [trilogy]), Shanxi guangbo dianshi daxue xue-
bao (Shaangxi Radio and TV University Journal) 3 (2013): 88–91.
188 Sissi’s World
and its path to modernity, many of them shared a noticeable nostal-

gia for China’s imperial legacies.16 However, such nostalgia could not
(yet) be expressed explicitly because of the party-state’s long-standing
anti-feudal agenda; China’s imperial and dynastic traditions were still
something to be condemned at this point in time. What about other
empires? To openly admire Great Britain’s or Japan’s royal pageantries,
aristocratic lifestyles, and colonial domination was politically danger-
ous, because the former was the oldest imperialist aggressor in China
and the latter had brutally invaded China in the 1930s. The French and
German imperial pasts were only slightly less problematic in commu-
nist China’s rogues gallery. In contrast, the Austro-Hungarian Empire
was never a major player in the imperialist competition in East Asia. It
had no real successor in international power politics after perishing in
1918, either. In other words, it was “weak” and irrelevant to the recent
Chinese past or present, and hence harmless. This made the imperial
splendor in the Sissi trilogy a kind of Old World or fairytale charm that
could be enjoyed without feeling politically or ideologically guilty. It
also exempted Sissi/Xixi of much historical baggage.
Perhaps still concerned that such an unreserved idolization of a sup-
posed class enemy is not “politically correct,” many Chinese fans of
Sisi/Xixi continue the search for moments in the trilogy that can be con-
strued as congruent with the official ideology and policies. They inter-
pret these moments using the PRC political vocabulary and framework
with which they are very familiar (and comfortable), and they explicitly
praise the Empress of Austria-Hungary as a model even for the officially
communist China. For example, a recent academic article argues that,
despite its “mild and elegant” visual presentation, this trilogy is essen-
tially about “the struggle between the progressive class [Sissi] and the
reactionary power [Archduchess Sophie and conservative ministers].”17
In 2015, Zhongguo minzu bao (China Ethnic News), the official organ of
the State Ethnic Affairs Commission, even featured an article praising
Sissi/Xixi as a “pioneer promoting ethnic autonomy” in Europe.18
Sissi/Xixi’s popularity can be seen in many aspects of contempo-
rary Chinese life. Since the late 1980s, the national broadcasting service
China Central Television (CCTV) has shown the trilogy on television
annually during the Chinese New Year holidays. Some fans say that
watching Sissi together after the CCTV’s annual New Year’s Eve Gala
16 For example, see Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in
Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 122–127.
17 Xie and Yang, “Lun Xixi gongzhu de wei chongtu,” 90.
18 Wu Chuyan, “Xixi gongzhu yu Ouzhou zui zao de minzu zizhi” (Princess
Sissi and the Earliest Ethnic Autonomy in Europe), Zhongguo minzu bao, June
8, 2015, available at: http://www.mzb.com.cn/html/report/1602232314-1.htm
(accessed June 2, 2017).
is a family ritual.19 Ding Jianhua, the voice actress who “played” Sissi
in the dubbed Chinese version, became a star for her memorable voice
performance in the trilogy and was later elected as a representative to
Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress.20 Romy Schneider was selected
in 1998 as one of the “famous figures [China’s] youth need to know”
for her portrayal of Sissi.21 On Baido Tiebar, the largest Chinese online
communication platform, Sissi/Xixi’s fans gather in the “Princess Xixi”
forum and discuss every detail in the films, trivia about Romy Schnei-
der’s cinematic Sissi, and anything related to Empress Elisabeth they
can find. They have compiled a list of all the dresses Romy Schneider
wore in the trilogy and collected the Chinese translations of Empress
Elisabeth’s poetry. Not surprisingly, they debate ad infinitum the ques-
tion of who Sissi’s true love was.22
Thanks to her popularity, Sissi/Xixi also inspired a minor trend to
name baby girls after her.23 There is a lack of publicly available and
19 For example, ledcon, “Ouzhou de wanghou men: Habusibao jiazu de chuanqi

Xixi gongzhu” (European Queens: the Legend of the Habsburg Family, Princess
Sissi/Xixi), Tianya.cn, September 20, 2005, available at: http://bbs.tianya.cn/
post-no05-27059-1.shtml (accessed June 2, 2017); “Xiang qi Xixi: yongyuan de
gongzhu” (Think of Sissi/Xixi: The Forever Princess), Shi shenghuo wang (Poetic
Life), November 9, 2007, available at: http://www.poemlife.com/blog-0-50112.
html (accessed June 2, 2017).
20 Ding Jianhua, “Wo yu Xixi gongzhu” (Sissi and I), Shanghai renda yuekan (Shang-
hai People’s Congress Monthly) 10 (2003): 37–38.
21 “Fengmi shijie de Xixi gongzhu & Luomi Shinaide” (World-Famous Sissi & Romy
Schneider), in Qingnian bi zhi renwu shouce ([Important] People the Youth Must
Know), ed. Wanzho (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1998). The Chi-
nese audience sees Schneider mostly through her portrayal of Sissi. Although
her Le Vieux fusil (1975) was introduced to China before the Sissi trilogy, she
was and is known and popular in China not as a mid-twentieth-century movie
star, but as the star who played Sissi. The Chinese Baidu Tiebar online forum
dedicated to her, for example, has a banner on its front page that says: “Luomi
Shinaide, yongyuan de Xixi gongzhu women ai nin!” (Romy Schneider, the
Eternal Princess Sissi, We Love You!). The Chinese fans also like to emphasize
the supposed similarity between Empress Elisabeth’s and Schneider’s real lives.
For example, “Yige zhenshi de zai Xixi gongzhu: Luomi Shinaide de ai yu chou”
(A Real Princess Sissi: the Love and Sorrow of Romy Schneider), Tianya luntan
(Tainya Forum), November 10, 2007, available at: http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-fu-
ninfo-1032676-1.shtml (accessed July 15, 2017).
22 Xixi gongzhu bar, available at: https://tieba.baidu.com/f?kw=%E8%8C%9C%E8
%8C%9C%E5%85%AC%E4%B8%BB&ie=utf-8 (accessed June 2, 2017). There are
more than 17,000 discussion threads on this forum as of June 2017.
23 There are no real canonical given names in Chinese-speaking societies, as there
are in the Christian tradition. Theoretically speaking, there is an infinite number
of possibilities to name one’s newborn with any auspicious or beautiful char-
acter, or any combination of two characters. Some names, however, are very
popular at a given time or in a given region. Naming trends therefore reflect,
very quickly, parents’ hopes and values at specific times and places.
190 Sissi’s World
precise statistics about the longer-term trends in the Chinese naming

practices.24 Using the database of degree theses completed in major Chi-
nese universities, we do have an imprecise but practical tool to gauge
the trend of naming one’s daughter 茜茜 (“Xixi” in Pinyin), the Chinese
transliteration of Sissi. Based on the 358 master’s theses written by some-
one with the given name Xixi between 2002 and 2016 (the database has
none before 2002), a clear surge in the number of completions occurred
after 2009, twenty-four to twenty-five years after Sissi was introduced
to the Chinese audience. 2010 is also the year when most students who
were born in or after 1985 began to complete their master’s degrees (at
the age of twenty-four). Between 2002 and 2008, there are only twen-
ty-four theses written by someone with the given named Xixi. In 2009,
the annual number reached double digits (thirteen) for the first time.
Since then, the number has climbed continuously and rapidly. In 2016
alone, there were sixty students named Xixi who completed their mas-
ter’s theses.25 Given the fact that population growth stabilized after the
One Child Policy’s introduction in 1979, the aforementioned surge in
Xixis cannot be attributed to overall population expansion; the parents’
decision must be the primary factor. The rapidly increasing number of
women named Xixi receiving advanced degrees after 2009 suggests that
we can reasonably expect the same trend holds for the much larger pop-
ulation who did not receive postgraduate education. In short, the data
suggest that the sensational success of the cinematic Sissi led more and
more parents to name their newborn daughters Xixi after the trilogy
was shown in China. Xixi may not (yet) be a top girl’s name in China,
but it is now part of a recognizable common repertoire. Who knew that
an Austrian empress/Hungarian queen would inspire a naming trend
in communist China almost a century after her death?
The popularity of Sissi/Xixi the figure and then the name itself even
changed the Chinese language. Specifically, it is the way the Chinese
character 茜 is pronounced. Originally it was pronounced qian in Man-
darin Chinese, and it referred to: 1) Indian madder, a flowering plant
used to make red pigment in China, or 2) the color scarlet. After the
trilogy’s success, xi, the character’s original secondary pronunciation
(rarely used, often only to transliterate foreign female names; for exam-
ple, Nanxi [Nancy]) became the primary pronunciation in the PRC, as
24 For the naming trends in 2016, see “Qiming da tieshi” (Naming Tips), Pinguo
ribao (Apple Daily Hong Kong), January 11, 2017, available at: http://hk.apple.
nextmedia.com/realtime/china/20170111/56157618 (accessed June 3, 2017).
25 Zhongguo youxiu shuoshi xuewei lunwen quanwen shuju ku (China Master’s
Theses Full-text Database), available at: http://gb.oversea.cnki.net/kns55/
brief/result.aspx?dbPrefix=CMFD (accessed June 3, 2017). Of the 358 theses, the
annual breakdown is: 2002: 1; 2003: 0; 2004: 2; 2005: 4; 2006: 8; 2007: 5; 2008: 6;
2009: 13; 2010: 20; 2011: 27; 2012: 44; 2013: 52; 2014: 56; 2015: 60; 2016: 60.
many girls write their names 茜茜 and pronounce them xixi, the same
way their parents pronounce the name of their beloved Sissi/Princess
Xixi. In recent years, this phonetic change has prompted recurrent
debates in the Chinese internet forums and mass media about what
exactly is the “correct” pronunciation of the character 茜.26 During the
2016 Summer Olympics, the Chinese media were so divided over how
to announce the name of a young diver who has this character as her
given name that the young woman had to clarify it publicly. “Please
call me Ren Xi,” she told the journalists assembled in Rio, and proudly
stated that she is named after the famous “Princess Xixi.” After she
claimed the gold medal in the women’s ten-meter platform dive, a
major Chinese news media excitingly declared: “Princess Xixi’s era has
arrived!”27
The Indispensable Sissi/Xixi: Narrating the History of the

Habsburg Lands in China
Given the popularity of Sissi/Xixi, it may not come as a surprise that
Sissi/Xixi is one of the central figures, if not the central figure when the
Chinese talk or write about the histories of Austria and Hungary. She
has become the most basic reference point Chinese authors rely on to
communicate with their audience on matters relating to Austria and
Habsburg Central Europe. A simple internet search yields countless
popular accounts—journalistic, literary, or fans’ blogposts—attesting to
this phenomenon. But Sissi/Xixi’s influence extends well beyond the
realm of popular culture.
He Rong, by training a sociologist as well as historian, published
very likely the first full-length, academically informed history of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Chinese language in 2001. Her Aox-
iong diguo (The Austro-Hungarian Empire) targets an educated audience
and attempts to go beyond simple story-telling. The manner in which
He introduces Franz Joseph, whose reign constitutes the bulk of the
book, shows how much the author anticipates that her audience’s
pre-existing knowledge of Austria-Hungary is Sissi/Xixi-centered:
“In fact, most readers are probably more familiar with Franz Joseph’s
wife: the capricious Bavarian Princess Xixi, the romantic and melan-
cholic Austrian Empress, the Hungarian Queen passionate for Magyar
26 For example: https://www.zhihu.com/question/27446985; and http://iask.

sina.com.cn/b/10497550.html (both links accessed June 1, 2017).
27 Jiang Jialing, “Qidai Xixi gongzhu de shidai,” Sina xinwen (Sina News),
August 20, 2016, available at: http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2016-08-20/doc-ifx-
vctcc8084216.shtml (accessed May 31, 2017). Internationally she is still known
as Ren Qian.
192 Sissi’s World
culture—she was the woman Franz Joseph loved but failed to please all
his life.”28 Sissi then takes pride of place as an indispensable and recur-
ring leitmotif in the ensuing narrative.
Indeed, the relationship between Franz Joseph and Elisabeth serves
as a central framing device of the book. The brief first encounter
between the two, when Franz Joseph fled to Innsbruck during the 1848
revolution, is explicitly connected by He to the larger trajectory of the
Habsburg Empire, whose fate “would fall on [Franz Joseph’s] shoul-
ders” with this “beginning of Europe’s most famous and most sad-
dening romance.” This prefiguring is followed up in the first post-1848
chapter. After two short sections discussing the increasing Austro-Prus-
sian tension and the Bach System of the 1850s, an extended section on
Franz Joseph and Sissi’s courtship, wedding, and the new Empress’s
problematic adaptation to the Viennese court life concludes the discus-
sion of the early Neo-absolutist years.29
Romy Schneider’s cinematic portrayal of Sissi totally dominates the
Chinese image of the historical Empress Elisabeth and serves as the
basis of the (locally created) Princess Xixi the Chinese audience has
come to know and idolize. He Rong’s account of mid-century Austria
faithfully reflects this Romy Schneider–Sissi focus and takes it even
further. The tension between Sissi and her mother-in-law Archduchess
Sophie, a major theme in the film trilogy, alternates in the book with
competent discussions of the Ringstrasse development, the war with
Sardinia and France, and the reform attempts in the early 1860s. The
letters between the imperial couple and Sissi’s anxiety during the war
receive as much space as the battlefield maneuvers. Long sections, tell-
ingly titled: “Sandwiched Man: Between Mom and Wife” and “In-law
Struggle: Irreconcilable Conflict,”30 not only deliver a melodramatic
version of the tension between the two leading ladies of the House, but
also reinforce the aforementioned narrative link between Sissi’s person-
ality, actions, and sufferings on the one hand, and the fate of the Monar-
chy on the other. “Franz Joseph,” He writes, “did not understand Xixi’s
28 He Rong, Aoxiong diguo (Beijing: Zhongguo guoji guangbo chubanshe, 2015),

3. This is a reissue of the 2001 edition published by Sanqin chubanshe in Xian.
The 2015 reissue is in a larger format and illustrated. It is not a surprise that
Sissi features prominently in the 2015 edition’s illustrations. In fact, the very
first illustration, immediately following the title page, is a portrait of Sissi. The
main body of the 2015 reissue is basically identical to the 2001 first edition. The
two most obvious changes are the slightly revised chapter titles and the newly
added section headings within each chapter. The new section headings, again,
prominently remind the reader where the chapter’s narrative shifts to Sissi-re-
lated discussion.
29 He, Aoxiong diguo, 51–55.
30 He, Aoxiong diguo, 58–61, 82–89. The Sissi emphasis in recounting the Aus-
tro-Sardinian War appears on 66.
behavior, just as he did not understand his subjects […] Whether it was
state affairs or family matters, dark shadows began to loom over Franz
Joseph’s life and presaged tragedies.”31 Sissi/Xixi becomes the meta-
phor for the Monarchy: glamorous, idiosyncratic, complex, elegant but
uncomfortable, well-intentioned but constrained and, ultimately, tragic.
The importance He attributes to Sissi in the creation of the Dual Mon-
archy exemplifies this Sissi/Xixi–Monarchy metaphorical link. He judi-
ciously avoids adding to the gossipy speculations about the nature of
the personal relationship between Sissi and Gyula Andrássy, a favorite
topic of the Chinese fans. She nonetheless gives Sissi a prominent role in
the developments leading to the 1867 Settlement (Ausgleich), highlight-
ing Sissi’s role as a trusted conduit between Franz Joseph and Ferenc
Deák and Andrássy and as a staunch advocate for the Hungarian cause.
The narrative weight Sissi receives in He’s account suggests that with-
out Sissi, there would be no reconciliation between the dynasty and
the Magyar elite, and no respite would be possible for the Habsburg
Empire in the wake of the military defeats in the 1850s and 1860s.32
The book’s depiction of Sissi’s growing unhappiness and unortho-
dox behaviors after 1867 echoes its narrative of events that underlines
the Dual Monarchy’s increasingly dim prospects. Sections on the grow-
ing distance between Franz Joseph and Sissi and on Franz Joseph’s
affairs dovetail with long discussions of the Monarchy’s alleged pathol-
ogies and structural challenges. The 1873 financial crisis was followed
by Sissi’s overseas travels and naïve correspondence with a “pen pal.”33
Sissi’s increasingly odd behaviors and fantasies are summarized after
a discussion of Crown Prince Rudolf’s disillusionment with his father
and the political structure of the day and before a detailed account of
Franz Joseph’s affairs with Anna Nahowski and Katharina Schratt.34
The role of Sissi in real politics diminishes after 1867 in He’s account; in
its stead, the well-known Sissi eccentricities and unhappiness are struc-
turally interwoven with familial problems and the Monarchy’s deepen-
ing political and economic crises leading up to the tragedy at Mayerling
and Sissi’s own violent death in 1898.35
Looking at chronology alone, Sissi’s tragedies in her later years did
coincide with the political and economic crises discussed in the book.
But the structure of narrative in He’s book points to a conscious effort
31 He, Aoxiong diguo, 89.

32 On Sissi’s political involvement in the run-up to the Settlement, see He, Aoxiong
diguo, 113–117 (section entitled “Xixi’s Magyar Complex”), and 124–128 (“The
Chain Reaction after the Defeat”); on the royal coronation in Budapest, see 134–
137.
33 He, Aoxiong diguo, 186–188.
34 He, Aoxiong diguo, 219–224, 225–234.
35 He, Aoxiong diguo, 246, 249–250.
194 Sissi’s World
to relate unfamiliar historical events and sometimes quite demanding

analysis to the intended audience’s assumed familiarity with Sissi/Xixi.
She is not only a convenient “lead” or attention-drawer; she becomes
the frame of reference to comprehend the inherently complex story He
tells.
He’s full-length history, which has no successor to date as far as we
know, is yet another example of the deep impression Romy Schneider–
Sissi left on the Chinese audience. A cinematic figure becomes the defin-
ing image of the historical person, and this popular culture creation
conditions the way in which the Chinese have understood and written
about Austrian and Habsburg history since the film trilogy was first
shown in China. The triumph of the Romy Schneider–cinematic Sissi
in China even feeds back into more serious historical writing, as He’s
Aoxiong diguo shows.
The framing influence of the cinematic Sissi on the Chinese view of
Habsburg Central Europe has been so prominent that it is now even
being consciously deployed to facilitate cultural diplomacy. In June
2017, the exhibition “Sissy (sic) and Hungary: The Magnificent Life of
the Hungarian Aristocracy in the 17–19th Century (sic)” opened in the
Shanghai Museum. In this exhibition Sissi is the defining reference point
that introduces the Chinese audience to an unfamiliar former Habsburg
land. The exhibition itself, in turn, aims to help establish a link between
China and Hungary in a new Euroasian strategic framework initiated
by the Chinese government. In other words, Sissi/Xixi’s fame and pop-
ularity is enlisted to help promote Chinese government policy.
As part of the program to promote and celebrate China’s current “One
Belt, One Road” initiative for national and international development,36
36 The exhibition opened two weeks after the first “Belt and Road Summit” in Bei-
jing, held on May 14 and 15, 2017. The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán
was one of the few EU heads of member-state governments who attended the
summit. After the summit, a Chinese government think tank released a report
on the Hungarian views of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative, in which Prime
Minister Orbán’s pro-China economic development strategy and the Hungar-
ian policy of actively joining the initiative were highlighted and praised. Two
weeks before the summit, in late April, the Hungarian “dance drama” The Leg-
end of Sissi opened the 17th “Meet in Beijing” Arts Festival; another Chinese
government cultural program now being directed to promote the initiative.
For the Chinese think tank report, see “Xiongyali kan Yidaiyilu zhiku baogao
fabu” (Deliberation of the think tank report on the Hungarian view of the “One
Belt, One Road” initiative), Guangming ribao (Guang Ming Daily), May 20, 2017,
available at: http://epaper.gmw.cn/gmrb/html/2017-05/20/nw.D110000g-
mrb_20170520_4-08.htm (accessed July 14, 2017). For the production and syn-
opsis of The Legend of Sissi, see the official webpage of the 17th “Meet in Beijing”
Arts Festival, available at: http://www.meetinbeijing.org.cn/en/showwudao.
asp?id=1002 (accessed July 14, 2017).
the 152 objects or sets of objects from the Hungarian National Museum
touring China showcase aspects of “the life of aristocratic families in the
past 400 (sic) years.”37 After Shanghai, the exhibition visits Beijing, Kun-
ming, and Xi’an.38 According to Benedek Varga, the Director General
of the Hungarian National Museum, the exhibition aims to “establish
a bold and dynamic mental bridge” between China and Hungary, the
first EU member state to enthusiastically embrace the “One Belt, One
Road” initiative. These aristocratic Hungarian objects will “contribute
to the strengthening of understanding, friendship, and multi-faceted
cooperation.”39 What do the traveling exhibition’s organizers identify
as the key to bringing the Chinese people into the museums and there-
fore “closer” to the Hungarian people? Sissi.
Director Varga states clearly that the main theme of this exhibition
is the rich cultural life of the Hungarian aristocracy. Complementing
this theme are the paintings and graphics depicting popular historical
figures (among the Hungarian aristocracy), such as Maria Theresia and
Sissi as the Hungarian Queen. In other words, Sissi is the packaging
of a much broader exhibition. But Varga’s Chinese colleagues have a
noticeably different take. To them, this is an exhibition with a special
focus on Sissi set in the larger context of the Hungarian aristocratic cul-
ture; she is the core of the exhibition. A considerable portion of their
remarks in the beautifully illustrated (but obviously hastily produced)
bilingual exhibition catalogue (in Chinese and English) reflects this par-
ticular emphasis.40 They retell the familiar narrative we have already
encountered in He’s book: Sissi’s role in the making of the Austro-Hun-
garian Empire (specifically, her indispensable role in reconciling the
House of Habsburg and the Hungarian elite), her affection for Hun-
gary, and her unhappy marriage. The directors of the Palace Museum in
37 Benedek Varga, “Message,” in Xixi gongzhu yu Xiongyali: 17–19 shiji Xiongyali

guizu shenghuo/Sissy and Hungary: The Magnificent Life of Hungarian Aristocracy
in the 17–19th Century (exhibition catalogue), ed. Shanghai Museum (Shanghai:
Shanghai Shuhua Chubanshe, 2017), 7.
38 The selection of these four cities to host this exhibition is probably not an acci-
dent. All are key transportation hubs in the “One Belt, One Road” initiative that
will facilitate China’s closer collaboration with the Eurasian, Southeast Asian,
and Indian Ocean regions in trade and geopolitical matters.
39 Varga, “Message,” 7.
40 An example of hasty production: all the alphabets with diacritical marks in the
catalogue’s two background essays, one by a Chinese historian and the other
by the former director general of the Hungarian National Museum, are miss-
ing. Thus the word “Österreich” is always rendered “ sterreich” and the name
Miklós is always “Mikl s.” See Shanghai Museum ed. Xixi gongzhu yu Xiongyali:
17–19 shiji Xiongyali guizu shenghuo/Sissy and Hungary: The Magnificent Life of
Hungarian Aristocracy in the 17–19th Century (exhibition catalogue) (Shanghai:
Shanghai Shuhua Chubanshe, 2017), 16–32.
196 Sissi’s World
Beijing and Yunnan Provincial Museum expressly made the connection

between the historical figure Queen Elisabeth and the popularity of the
Sissi trilogy in China. The director of the Yunnan Provincial Museum
even confidently anticipates that this exhibition will lead to an upsurge
of museum visitors due to their “Princess Sissy (sic) Complex.”41
The Chinese exhibition design team does its best to honor the heavy
Sissi emphasis of the local organizers’ publicity campaign.42 The exhibi-
tion in Shanghai Museum consists of five sections: the Habsburg Mon-
archy and Hungary, clothing, daily life, weaponry, and religious life.
Upon entering the exhibition, a short historical introduction of how the
Habsburg family became the rulers of Hungary welcomes visitors. The
first room presents a replica of the Holy Crown of Hungary, printed
images of the crown, and the coronation insignia. The second room
features images of Maria Theresia, Emperor Franz I, King Ferdinand V
(Emperor Ferdinand I), and their coronations. To conclude the Habsburg
Monarchy section, the third room, bigger than the first two and painted
in striking pink, is dedicated to Sissi. Here, two portraits of Franz Joseph
and the commemorative coins celebrating his coronation are displayed
as complements to objects related to Sissi, even though he was the
longest-reigning ruler of Hungary. The introductory text for the room
mentions him rarely, and only to remind the visitors that he was Sissi’s
husband. The main point of the entire Sissi room is how much Sissi loved
Hungary and how much Hungarians loved her back. Sissi’s political
mission, as presented by the curators (we do not know if it is the Hun-
garian curators’ or the Chinese organizers’ decision), was to help create
the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. Therefore, after accomplishing
this mission she lived in Hungary most of the time and only went back
to Vienna when necessary. Interestingly, while there was no caption for
the two Franz Joseph portraits, one captioned portrait of Count Gyula
Andrássy hangs in the Sissi room. The caption points to Andrássy’s
“handsome appearance” and political ambition. And, probably to the
delight of Sissi/Xixi’s Chinese fans and taking advantage of their long-
held interest in Sissi’s love life, the caption states that Andrássy and Elis-
abeth were “confidants” and “many even believe them to be lovers.”43
41 Shanghai Museum ed., Xixi gongzhu yu Xiongyali, 8–15.

42 The curatorial team of the exhibition consists of three members from the Hun-
garian National Museum and only one from the Shanghai Museum, while all
14 members of the exhibition design team are from the Chinese museums. The
object annotations in the catalogue are authored by the Hungarians. Our guess
is that the objects are chosen mostly by the Hungarians, but the Chinese muse-
ums decide how the objects are presented. Shanghai Museum ed., Xixi gongzhu
yu Xiongyali, 252–253.
43 Shanghai Museum ed., Xixi gongzhu yu Xiongyali, 106.
In an exhibition that is headlined by Sissi and promoted with heavy

use of her images, what are the objects about Sissi herself? Of the 152
objects and sets of objects, only sixteen or seventeen of them relate
directly to her. Most of them, furthermore, are mass-produced prints,
photos, and coins with Sissi’s image. There are precious few of Sissi’s
personal effects: a coat, a belt, and a pair of shoes.44 They occupy a room
at the center of the exhibition, thus spatially the most prominent loca-
tion. This scarcity of Sissi objects further strengthens the aforementioned
contrast between the Hungarian director’s and the Chinese directors’
takes on the real focus of the exhibition. It is abundantly clear that the
Chinese organizers are exaggerating the Sissi element of the whole
enterprise.45
We do not know if the Chinese visitors to the exhibition are disap-
pointed by the relative scarcity of Sissi in the “Sissy (sic) and Hungary”
exhibition. Whether they are also thinking about the exhibition’s polit-
ical significance, which is to help connect President Xi Jinping’s China
and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and facilitate a new global
economic order (and more), is also unknown. But there is no doubt that
the Chinese organizers are playing to their intended audiences’ pre-ex-
isting knowledge and preference; Sissi is perhaps the only reference
point the locals can relate to and, consequently, the most natural selling
point of the exhibition. Sissi is, then, the flavor of the cultural appetizer
that is to entice the Chinese people to support and contribute to the
budding Sino-Hungarian friendship. Without Sissi’s name and images
as the center of gravity (that borders on deceptive advertising), can an
exhibition about Hungarian aristocratic life, with its mission of foster-
ing Sino-Hungarian connections as almost a throwback to the Cold
War-era “friendship” cultural exchange, really lead to (as one of this
44 And a ladies’ sidesaddle alleged to have been used by Sissi. Shanghai Museum
ed., Xixi gongzhu yu Xiongyali, 104–105.
45 In the Shanghai Museum’s earlier call for construction supervisors, the exhi-
bition project was initially named “Xixi gongzhu de shidai” (The Era of Prin-
cess Sissi). Based on the project description posted on a government contract
bidding website, the 150-plus objects of the exhibition were already chosen
(probably by the Hungarian curators) by mid-February 2017. Knowing that
only a small portion of the exhibited objects are related to Sissi, the Shanghai
Museum still decided to emphasize Sissi as the focus of the finalized exhibition
“Sissy [sic] and Hungary.” See “Shanghai Bowuguan ‘Xixi gongzhu de shidai
(zhanming),’ ‘Daying Bowuguan baijian wenwu zhan (zhanming)’ zhaobiao
gonggao" (Shanghai Museum Calls for Bidders: “Princess Sissi’s Era [tentative
title]” and “One Hundred Objects from the British Museum [tentative title]”)
Xhongguo jianshe gongcheng zhaobiao wang (China Public Construction Bid-
ding Net), February 14, 2017, available at: http://www.zbwmy.com/zbxx/
zbgg/2017/02/14090716525851.html (accessed July 14, 2017).
198 Sissi’s World
essay’s authors has observed in person) an upsurge of young, mostly

female visitors to the Shanghai Museum?
Sissi/Xixi Sells: Brand Power and Fantasies

If academically informed history writing and cultural diplomacy-driven
exhibition are both under the spell of the cinematic Sissi, her Chinese
reception-creation derivative, Princess Xixi, reveals the full potential of
cultural appropriation in the galloping Chinese consumer culture.
Chinese businesspeople and advertisers know too well that a large
segment of potential customers, specifically young women who grew
up watching the Sissi trilogy in movie theaters or on TV, have fallen
under Sissi/Xixi’s spell. The Chinese audience’s obsession with the
cinematic Sissi makes her the perfect pitchwoman for a wide range of
goods and services that can speak to certain desirable qualities attribut-
able to Sissi/Xixi. Many of these qualities may or may not have factual
basis in either the cinematic Sissi or the historical Empress Elisabeth.
Chinese businesspeople and their customers, therefore, are operating
under the influence of their own projections and fantasies. These, in
turn, have sustained and reinforced the power of the Chinese Princess
Xixi.
To some Chinese tourists, going to Central Europe means going on a
Sissi/Xixi pilgrimage. In China’s booming international travel industry,
packaged bus tours around Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech
Republic are often marketed as a journey to the Sissi/Xixi land. Perhaps
as a way to prime Chinese tourists’ shared expectations and excitement,
the Chinese-dubbed Sissi trilogy is sometimes played on tour buses as
they traverse the European continent. Evan Osnos’s New Yorker article
on his experience with such a Chinese bus tour, for example, vividly
describes how the trilogy accompanied the tourists on their seven-hour
drive from Paris to the Alps, the cinematic Sissi/Xixi’s beloved refuge.46
Popular travel writings and guidebooks also invite their readers to see
Central Europe through an imaginary Sissi/Xixi lens. In Vienna, one has
to visit the Sisi Museum in the Hofburg and Sissi’s final resting place in
the Imperial Crypt to “closely appreciate the real life of the beautiful
Empress Sissi.”47 One must go to Schönbrunn Palace, “Sissi’s home,”
to trace “her legendary romance.”48 While the Viennese Musikverein is
46 Evan Osnos, “The Grand Tour: Europe on Fifteen Hundred Yuan A Day,” The
New Yorker, April 18, 2011, available at: http://www.newyorker.com/maga-
zine/2011/04/18/the-grand-tour (accessed May 29, 2017).
47 “Xixi gongzhu bowuguan” (Princess Sissi Museum), Qiong you wang (Budget
Travel) available at: http://place.qyer.com/poi/V2cJZlFmBzNTYg/ (accessed
May 29, 2017).
48 Zhou Ping,“Meiquan gong: Xixi gongzhu zhi jia” (Schönbrunn Palace: Princess
Sissi/Xixi’s Home), Shijie bolan (World Vision) 19 (2013): 74–75.
worth a visit because “it was built by (sic!) Franz Joseph, Sissi’s hus-
band,”49 Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria should not be missed,
since it was commissioned by the “handsome yet lonely” King Lud-
wig II of Bavaria for “his true love” Sissi/Xixi.50 Likewise, Hungary is
special because it was “Sissi’s favorite country.”51 Meissen porcelain
pieces, though of Saxon origin, are precious because Sissi loved them.52
To spend the night in the same hotel room in which Sissi once stayed
would be, of course, an exceptional experience to write home about.53
Sissi/Xixi gives meaning and endows significance to the sites a Chi-
nese tourist visits in Central Europe. By actually visiting those places,
a savvy Chinese traveler not only fulfills his or her dream of “getting
closer” to a personal idol but also stocks up on his or her personal
cultural capital. Under the banner of “Reform and Opening Up,” for-
eign travel experiences as well as appreciation of European culture no
longer carry the “bourgeois” stigma they did before the end of the Cul-
tural Revolution. A 180-degree U-turn indeed, Europe-related experi-
ences are now a welcomed asset associated positively with higher class,
better taste, superior understanding of the world, and sophistication
in general. By going to the Sissi/Xixi land, a Chinese visitor presuma-
bly instantly acquires a deeper and more “authentic” understanding of
Sissi/Xixi and exclusive access to her elevated aura. One Chinese travel
agency thus encourages the more adventurous customers to take part
in the Vienna ball season: “Wear the elegant evening dress,” it urges,
“[you will] transform into Princess Xixi for a night!”54
For the majority of Chinese who do not have the opportunity or the
means to go on a Sissi pilgrimage, there is an easier and cheaper alter-
native. China’s leading online shopping platforms, such as Taobao.com
49 Wei Cheng, “Jinse dating de na dian er shi, ni zhende zhidao ma?” (Do You
Really Know About the Golden Hall?), Oushidai (European Times), available at:
http://www.oushidai.com/information/pc/2171 (accessed May 28, 2017).
50 “Lude weixi er shi: wei Xixi gongzhu xiujian Tianebao de guowang” (Lud-
wig II: The King Who Built the Swan Castle for Princess Sissi/Xixi), Xinhua
Net, August 5, 2011, available at: http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2011-
08/05/c_121820845.htm (accessed May 28, 2017). Xinhua is the People’s Repub-
lic of China’s official news agency.
51 Dongtain, Dongou lüyou: gei ni yi ben zui haokan de (Eastern Europe: the Best
Travel Guide) (Guangzhou: Guangdong lüyou chubanshe, 2014), 67.
52 Qiao Xiaowei, “Xixi gongzhu de zui ai: Ouzhou ming ci Meissen” (Princess
Sissi/Xixi’s Favorite: The Famous European Porcelain Brand Meissen), Da
meishu (Great Art) 8 (2007): 124–127.
53 Jian Zheng, “Deshi zhu jin Xixi gongzhu tao jian” (The Ambassador Stayed in
the Princess Sissi/Xixi Suite), Shijie zhishi (World Affairs) 13 (2000): 42–43.
54 “Zai Weiyena wuhui ji zuo yi ci Xixi gongzhu” (Becoming Princess Xixi in the
Vienna Ball Season), Lulutrip.com, available at: http://article.lulutrip.com/
view/id-4801 (accessed May 20, 2017).
200 Sissi’s World
and jd.com, offer a dizzying array of services and consumer products

named after or inspired by Princess Xixi. From the perhaps predictable
items such as toys, hair accessories, handbags, women’s clothing, lin-
gerie, skin care products, perfumes, beddings, to the more far-fetched
ones such as sanitary napkins (Figure 8.1), Halloween costumes, online
RPG games, electric motorbikes, and even silicon sex dolls, Xixi embod-
ies a brand power that the real Empress Elisabeth probably would have
found very difficult to comprehend.
Figure 8.1 Advertisement for Sissi Sanitary Napkins. “Once you try,

you will love it for the rest of your life,” reads the large-font caption,
http://www.nipic.com/show/11214882.html (image captured on
June 5, 2017). The product is different from the more established Bei-
jing-based Xixi Gongzhu/SISI PRINCESS brand’s silk sanitary napkins:
http://china.globrand.com/news/422365.html (accessed on June 5,
2017). Is this a case of domestic knockoff?
To Chinese businesspeople and consumers alike, Princess Xixi is

prominently and intimately associated with romantic love. The Sissi–
Franz Joseph romance and their splendid imperial wedding, as staged
in the film Sissi, have always been a central theme in the Chinese popular
accounts of Sissi/Xixi. It is only logical that several owners have named
their wedding photography studios after Princess Xixi (Figure 8.2).55
On Taobao.com, there is also “Princess Xixi Home Decor” specializing
in home furnishings for newlyweds. Although the Chinese-style red-
and-gold pillow cases and banners on offer have little to do with the
cinematic Sissi’s or the historical Elisabeth’s publicly displayed styles,
the retailer obviously believes that the wares will be more popular if the
company carries the name of the romantic icon.56
Figure 8.2 “Cici Princess,” a promotional sample from the wedding

photography studio Qiqihaer Shihualuo gaoduan sheying gongdi
(Qiqihaer Swarovski High-End Photo Palace). http://www.wed114.
cn/photo/a253410.html (image captured on June 4, 2017). Naming the
studio after Sissi/Xixi and Swarovski in the same breath is no accident.
Both can signal refinement, sophistication, luxury, and an Austrian/
European upper-class status in the Chinese context.
55 For example, there is a “Princess Xixi Wedding Photography” in Suzhou and

a “Shanghai Princess Xixi High Quality Wedding Photography” in the epony-
mous city.
56 Xixi gongzhu jiashi qijiandian on Taobao.com available at: https://xxgz.world.
tmall.com/shop/view_shop.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.5.ebb2eb2UbwoVb&user_
number_id=608700044 (accessed June 4, 2017).
202 Sissi’s World
In the Sissi trilogy Romy Schneider made Sissi/Xixi into an embod-

iment of female beauty, and her elaborate costumes made Sissi/Xixi a
fashion icon in the Chinese popular imagination. After that the com-
mercialization of Sissi/Xixi’s popularity was only a matter of time,
scale, and originality. For example, Xiya doudou, a clothing company
focusing on young female professionals, declares that the brand is
inspired by Princess Xixi’s “fashionable, distinct, noble, and elegant
lifestyle.” To drive home the point, the company’s website offers a sim-
ple but historically unfounded story of how Princess Xixi helped Franz
Joseph become the emperor of “the strongest (sic) country of the nine-
teenth century Europe” by winning over everyone with her “striking
variety of clothing and personal styling.” Paying homage to this leg-
endary European “princess,” Xiya doudou designers present a series of
“trendy, luxurious, and fresh apparel that captures Princess Xixi’s noble
spirit of purity and freedom.”57
To enhance the (supposed) Europeanness and the exclusiveness of
their products, some Chinese companies add specious or even outright
deceptive trappings to their already creative Sissi/Xixi branding. SISI
Gongzhu Handbags (est. 2010), for instance, blends conflicting claims
to make its products Sissi/Xixi-related and Italian simultaneously. The
brand is named after Princess Xixi, according to its official website,
not only because the design team wants to “underline her exceptional
elegance and imperial splendor,” but also because the firm’s founding
designer is a “young,” “beautiful,” and “vivacious” Chinese girl named
Xixi.58 Elsewhere the firm claims to originate from Milan’s “Galleria Vit-
torio Emanuele II,” and its branded products are designed by a certain
Lar Cagefield.59 Obviously, this is a play on the name of the German
fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld and therefore a common trick of those
Chinese entrepreneurs specializing in knockoff brands.60
57 “Xiya doudou,” Hua yi nüzhuang wang (Chinese Women’s Clothing), availa-

ble at: http://www.lady.ef360.com/Brand/Index16068.html (accessed June 4,
2017).
58 “Xixi Gongzhu (SISI) guanfang qijian dian pinpai gushi” (Princess Xixi [SISI]
Official Flagship Store: Brand Story), Weipinhui (VIP), available at: http://
brand.vip.com/SISI/ (accessed June 4, 2017).
59 “Xixi Gongzhu xiangbao” (Princess Xixi Handbag), Baidu baike, available at:
http://baike.baidu.com/item/%E8%8C%9C%E8%8C%9C%E5%85%AC%E
4%B8%BB%E7%AE%B1%E5%8C%85/2351921?fr=aladdin (accessed June 4,
2017). Baidu baike is the Chinese equivalent of Wikipedia.
60 “Xixi Gongzhu (xiangbao pinpai)” (Princess Xixi [Handbag Brand]), Baidu
baike, available at: http://baike.baidu.com/item/%E8%8C%9C%E8%8C%
9C%E5%85%AC%E4%B8%BB/4653454. For examples of (creative) Chinese
knockoffs of established Western brands, see Will Heilpern, “17 of the Most
Shameless Chinese Rip-Offs of Western Brands,” Business Insider, May 6, 2016,
available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/things-that-china-copied-from-
the-world-2016-5 (accessed May 31, 2017).
Xixi Gongzhu/SISSI PRINCESS (Princess Xixi), a leading lingerie

and functional shapewear brand in China, goes even further. It crafts
a fascinating but unlikely (or simply fake?) story, mixing French Haute
Couture, 100 percent silk lingerie, and the sex appeal of Romy Sch-
neider–Sissi (Figure 8.3). This Beijing-based firm claims that in 2007 it
invested more than eight million (sic) Euros to purchase the original
French brand “closely associated with Charles Frederick Worth.” The
Beijing firm alleges that Worth, the founding father of Haute Couture,
was responsible for Princess Xixi’s beauty and inspiring presence,
which in turn “contributed to the unification [sic] of the Austro-Hun-
garian Empire” and turned her into “a model of nobility, elegance,
beauty, and health for women around the world.” Romy Schneider’s
beautiful costumes in the Sissi trilogy, the firm adds, were faithful
reproductions of Worth’s original designs. Then in the 1950s, a French
baron Rang Piluo61—a “fashion master” who “inherited Worth’s
Figure 8.3 Official website of Xixi Gongzhu/SISSI PRINCESS, http://

www.sissiok.com/Product/list-3-0.html (image captured on June 4,
2017). The firm claims that Sissi “is the model of grace, elegance, health,
and beauty for women from all over the world,” and that the mission
of its staff and franchisees, the “Xixi ren” (“Xixians”), is to contribute
to “human beings’ eternal (sic) health and beauty,” http://www.sis-
siok.com/News/detail-4-41-773.html and http://www.sissiok.com/
index.html (accessed on June 5, 2017). Given Empress Elisabeth’s vari-
ous physical and mental ailments, it is interesting that the Beijing firm
highlights the associations between Sissi/Xixi, beauty, and health and
promotes its SISSI-branded shapewear as health products.
61 This is probably a Chinese imitation of “Jean-Pierre.” We don’t know if any

real Parisian lingerie brand was called “Sissi Princess,” or if there was indeed a
French lingerie designer with the said name who created this brand.
204 Sissi’s World
designer genes”—was so inspired by these costumes that he created

a line of shapewear that was both functional and regal. With Rang
Piluo’s brand under its control, the firm states that it is determined to
make these exclusive products available to Chinese customers and help
them “create attractive figures and reproduce Princess Xixi’s feminine
allure.”62 Over 600 directly owned and franchise stores have allegedly
been opened since then, and a “Princess Xixi Business School” was
established in 2009 to train salespersons and managers for them.63 The
company has also embarked on an expansion of its product lines: essen-
tial oils, skin care products, feminine pads, and even a “Princess Xixi
Feminine Pearl Cream,” which will, according to promotional material,
“nourish, tighten, and protect the vagina.”64
Sissi/Xixi’s sexualized commercialization is not limited to what
women (should) wear. Some Chinese marketers do not hesitate to play
up the usually unmentioned or under-discussed carnal appeal of Romy
Schneider–Sissi. A telling example of it is the “Princess Xixi Breast Aug-
mentation” offered by a Changshu plastic surgery clinic. The “Demei
Sissi Series of Teardrop-Shaped Implant Device,” the clinic promises,
will transform their patients into Princess Xixi, “the embodiment of
beauty who represents both feminine sexiness and pure aesthetics” as
well as “every man’s dream” (Figure 8.4).65 Like the lingerie-maker Xixi
Gongzhu, this clinic’s website features images of a buxom Romy Sch-
neider–Sissi, exaggerated Sissi/Xixi stories, and short descriptions of
the services/products on offer. Next to their praises of Sissi/Xixi as a
“budding Bavarian rose,” one finds a hyperlink to “Suggested Read-
ings: What’s the best breast augmentation in Changshu?” Sissi/Xixi, in
this context, has progressed from an embodiment of beauty to an object
of overt sexual desire and physical imitation.66
62 “Xixi Gongzhu pinpai suyuan—gongneng xing jiankang meixue neiyi de dan-

sheng” (The Princess Xixi Brand’s Origin: The Birth of Health-Aesthetics Func-
tional Shapewear), Xixi xinwen (Sissi News), February 10, 2017, available at:
http://www.sissiok.com/News/detail-4-41-773.html (accessed May 26, 2017).
63 “Xixi Shangxue Yuan” (Xixi Business College), Xixi gongzhu/SISI Princess,
available at: http://www.sissiok.com/school/index-6-0.html (accessed June 4,
2017).
64 “Xixi Gongzhu fuke zhenzhu ningjiao (suo yin mei yin hu yin)” (Princess Xixi
Feminine Pearl Cream [nourishing, tightening, and protecting the vagina]),
1688.com, available at: https://detail.1688.com/offer/551666608045.html?sp-
m=0.0.0.0.BMWBUC (accessed June 4, 2017).
65 Dreamxcell-Sissi xilie Xixi gongzhu xianjin fengxiong jiati (Dreamxcell Sissi
Series: Princess Xixi Advanced Implant Device), available at: http://www.
csrlzx.com/zt/fengxiong/ (accessed June 4, 2017).
66 Louisa Schein points out that in the 1980s and the early 1990s, the white Western
woman was “an object of desire” who “monopolized” the “eroticized domain”
but later ceded some space to other women. The interesting question is why
Sissi’s sexualized commodification took a while to take off. Schein, “The Con-
sumption of Color,” 156.
Figure 8.4 “Princess Xixi Breast Augmentation” webpage, http://

www.csrlzx.com/zt/fengxiong/ (image captured on June 4, 2017). An
image of Romy Schneider–Sissi from the film trilogy is on the right,
while the buxom Chinese woman on the left promotes the clinic’s zero-
down payment installment plan to potential customers.
In addition to wearing Sissi/Xixi-inspired garments and imitating

her physical features, another way to “become” Sissi/Xixi in China
is to live in her world. In 2013, a Beijing-based real estate developer
announced Dingxiu Meiquan Xiaozen, a Sissi/Xixi-themed housing
development project to be built on the outskirts of the expanding Bei-
jing metropolitan area. In its promotional material, the developer prom-
ises that the residents of the “town” will “feel as if they were living in
Europe.” Not only is “meiquan” (beautiful spring), the most common
Chinese translation of Schönbrunn, chosen as the name of this suburban
development, but all the buildings and townhouses in this “Europe-
an-style” community are supposed to be modeled after those found in
four “famous European towns”— Baden-Baden, Salzburg, Innsbruck,
and Lucerne. To further “make European culture real and tangible” to
Meiquan Xiaozen’s residents and visitors, the developer dedicates the
“town” center to Sissi, “Schönbrunn’s most famous and influential res-
ident.” On the main street, a “Rhine” restaurant (sic) named Yisheer
(the Chinese transliteration of Bad Ischl, the small town where Sissi and
Franz Joseph met and fell in love, according to the Chinese fans) would
serve “romantic French cuisine.” There is another restaurant named
Babili (allegedly Sissi’s nickname for her father in the film), where
guests can enjoy a Hong Kong-style hot pot in a Bavarian-themed din-
ing room. A further “Rose Restaurant,” named after Princess Xixi’s
206 Sissi’s World
alleged favorite flower, serves Japanese donburi and Chinese noodles

and dumplings.67
The crown jewel of the Sissi/Xixi-themed “downtown” is a five-story
hotel aiming to “re-create the imperial atmosphere of the Austro-Hun-
garian Empire” (Figure 8.5).68 “Come to enjoy the life of princes and
princesses,” the hotel’s official Weibo microblog states. The hotel invites
its guest to “[i]mmerse yourself in the romantic European atmosphere
and Princess Xixi’s beautiful love! … Meet Elisabeth (sic) in Dingxiu
Meiquan Hotel!”69 Indeed, when visitors enter this Sissi-themed hotel’s
lobby, they will encounter a giant oil painting of Empress Elisabeth
hung above an allegedly “Bavarian style” fireplace (Figure 8.6). Despite
Figure 8.5 Dingxiu Meiquan Hotel, the facade. Its “cultural theme,”

according to the official website, is “based on the legends of Princess
Xixi from the 19th century Austro-Hungarian Empire, decorated in
the Biedermeier style, and representing the classical, exquisite, comfy,
romantic, and elegant fashion of medieval (sic) Europe,” http://mei-
quanhotel.com/index/index.html (image captured on June 5, 2017).
67 Zhang Qiang ed. 2013 Zhongguo wenhua dichan hangye fazhan baogao (Annual
Report on Cultural Real Estate Developments in China, 2013) (Beijing: Beijing
lianhe chubanshe, 2014), 164. “Babili Tianyuan Huoguo,” available at: http://
meiquanhotel.com/diet/details/id/9.html (accessed June 4, 2017); “Yisheer
Xicanting” (Yisheer Restaurant), available at: http://meiquanhotel.com/diet/
details/id/4.html (accessed June 4, 2017).
68 Available at: http://meiquanhotel.com/company/index.html (accessed June 4,
2017).
69 “Qian yin Xixi gongzhu langman, xiangyue weimei ouzhou fengqing”
(Taste Princess Xixi’s Romance, Experience the Beautiful European Flair),
April 8, 2017, available at: http://www.weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show
?id=2309404094228648057024 (accessed June 4, 2017). This post is from the offi-
cial Weibo account of the Dingxiu Meiquan Hotel.
Figure 8.6 Dingxiu Meiquan Hotel’s official Weibo account captions

this photo (showing the lobby) with a typical Sissi/Xixi sales pitch:
“Crystal chandeliers, Princess Xixi portrait, fine stone walls, sophisti-
cated decor, luxury European-style solid wood furniture; the moment
you step in you are in the 19th-century Austro-Hungarian Empire.”
Note the Sissi portrait hanging above the fireplace and the (apparently
European) model posing as a modern day Sissi. http://www.weibo.
com/ttarticle/p/show?id=2309404094228648057024 (accessed on June
5, 2017).
208 Sissi’s World
the fact that a knockoff of the Cybele Fountain at Madrid’s Plaza de

Cibeles and a life-size plastic statue of a British foot guard have been
rather randomly placed in front of the hotel,70 some enthusiastic Sissi/
Xixi fans declare that this hotel fulfills their dream to “travel back in
time” to “meet with Princess Xixi.” The interior decoration of the gues-
trooms, they claim, is inspired either by the sets of the Sissi trilogy or
“Princess Xixi’s favorites” (according to the fans), and thus “authenti-
cally European.” Every detail of the hotel, from the milk served with
the complimentary breakfast to the color of the chairs in the hotel bar,
reminds one visitor of “particular moments in Princess Xixi’s life.”71
After so much effort by both her Chinese fans and local marketers,
space has overcome time and the Chinese determination and ingenuity
(or unscrupulousness and gullibility, depending on one’s perspective)
have resulted in the reification of fantasies. Sissi/Xixi’s indigenization
is finally complete: her world, and by extension herself, is literally only
a short drive from Beijing.
The Chinese Princess Xixi

Sissi/Xixi’s Chinese career reflects the great transformation of post-Mao
Chinese culture and society. In a society that has only recently emerged
from a nationalistic anti-Western isolation and the communist icono-
clasm of the Cultural Revolution, Sissi/Xixi represents what is desira-
ble and longed for from Europe, or the non-American “West,” and what
is missing in China thanks, in part, to the communist revolution. She is
a particularly successful symbol for an imagined refined European past
and its sophistication, untainted by either bourgeois snobbery or mate-
rialistic mass culture vulgarity. But as China has undergone significant
70 Some Chinese visitors came not for Princess Xixi but specifically for the knock-
off buildings and statues. Reportedly there are also a fake Dutch water mill
and a replica San Marco Campanile of Venice. For example, Songfeng luo Yue,
“Zaiyou Huairou Dingxiu Meiquan Xiaozhen, yi xi yi you” (Revisiting Huai-
rou Dingxiu Meiquan Xiaozhen, With Mixed Feelings), Mafeng wo (Wasps’
Net), October 28, 2014, available at: http://www.mafengwo.cn/i/3227264.
html (accessed June 4, 2017). For a discussion on this so-called shanzhai (cop-
ycat) town phenomena, see Bianca Bosker, Original Copies: Architectural Mim-
icry in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013). The
most famous copycat town in China might be Hallstatt in Louyang, China. It
is a development project constructing a whole new community modeled after
the famous Austrian town Hallstatt on Hallstätter See in Salzkammergut. For a
fascinating report on the Chinese Hallstatt, see Kla, “Xeroxed Village: Chinese
Secretly Copy Austrian UNESCO Town,” Spiegel Online, June 16, 2011, available
at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/xeroxed-village-chinese-se-
cretly-copy-austrian-unesco-town-a-768754.html (accessed June 4, 2017).
71 Shi yun Meng Xun, “Xixi, nihuao!” (Hello, Sissi!), Yido, May 31, 2016, available
at: https://read01.com/PQ3R3E.html (accessed June 4, 2017).
economic and social changes, Sissi/Xixi also has been transformed into
the perfect pitchwoman for a crass but also unscrupulously imaginative
consumer culture, selling to anyone who can afford new handbags, lin-
gerie, fancy new apartments, and breast augmentation.
In post-Mao China, Sissi/Xixi becomes a de-contextualized fantasy
onto which dreams, desires, and aspirations of many kinds can be liber-
ally projected and then manipulated for different purposes. The lack of
historical or factual basis for many Chinese associations with and uses
of Sissi/Xixi is in fact a great advantage in this regard; it frees the imag-
ination and endows her with a profitable versatility in an (almost) any-
thing-is-possible Chinese consumer culture. The farther Princess Xixi,
herself a Chinese creation derived from the cinematic Romy Schneider–
Sissi, travels from the historical Empress Elisabeth, the more powerful
and versatile the icon Sissi/Xixi becomes.
The Chinese Xixi is a fascinating case of cultural appropriation made
possible by singularly advantageous timing and circumstances, phys-
ical and cultural distance, and, in many instances, sheer ignorance—
both willful and not. The fanciful Chinese discourses about Sissi/Xixi
and the inventive commercialization of Princess Xixi may tempt some
to see in her a case of imaginative local appropriation of Western cul-
tural symbols for its own purposes and, hence, a subversion of the
West’s global cultural hegemony. But the preceding discussion makes
it very clear that this beloved princess of a theoretically anti-feudal,
anti-capitalist, and nationalist “New China” subverts neither the West-
ern cultural hegemony nor the capitalist economic order. It is an ide-
alized European princess, albeit one that is (at least partially) created
by the Chinese audiences themselves, who represents what is desirable
and emulation-worthy; in other words, it is “the Western/European,”
even if a faux West or an imaginary European figure, that has the ulti-
mate cultural cache and hence authority.72 And Sissi/Xixi’s enduring
power is more often than not manifested in the commercial interests
she is called to serve, and by the fact that she meets few protests or criti-
cisms in such capacity. A small number of self-identified Sissi/Xixi fans
expressed some doubts about the mythologized Sissi/Xixi after they
visited Vienna and knew more about Empress Elisabeth’s unhappy
life. But the disenchantment is mostly about their own (and perhaps
China’s) lost innocence of the 1980s and the early 1990s, rather than
72 Establishing a European-style finishing school to teach the Chinese nouveau

riche European manners is therefore more than logical after they become more
self-confident. See Virginie Mangin, “Western Manners: The Latest Chinese
Status Symbol,” BBC Capital, February 20, 2015, available at: http://www.bbc.
com/capital/story/20150219-the-latest-chinese-status-symbol (accessed June 4,
2017).
210 Sissi’s World
with the commercialized and objectified Sissi/Xixi of the present day.73

While some women of the “Reform and Opening Up” generation now
use the life of Sissi/Xixi to mark their own transition from dreamy girl-
hood to disillusioned or cynical adulthood, the commercialization of
Sissi/Xixi is actually kicking into even higher gear.
Indigenized and transformed, Sissi/Xixi remains the quintessential
Chinese Princess embodying the paradoxes of post-Mao “socialism
with Chinese characteristics” and serving the wants and needs of the
increasingly prosperous Chinese consumer. We would not be surprised
in the future to see airliners sporting Sissi-themed livery and flying
between Shanghai and Vienna or between Beijing and Budapest.
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Part II
Myth
Melancholy Empress: Queering
Nine
Empire in Ernst Marischka’s Sissi
Films
Heidi Schlipphacke
I originally published this essay in 2010 in the film journal Screen.1 My goal
had been to direct attention to Ernst Marischka’s iconic Sissi films (1955, 1956,
1957) as works whose popularity was grounded not only in the potentially
regressive romance narrative between the Bavarian “princess” and the Habsburg
Emperor—between pre-national and pre-Nazi Germany and Austria; rather, I
wanted to emphasize the ways in which the complex aesthetics of the films invite
intense and frequently contradictory emotions on the part of diverse spectators
and must therefore be taken seriously. The films’ aesthetic modes include not
only Heimat (homeland/nationalist) and heritage cinema but also allegorical
drama, tableaux vivants, camp and the overcoded mise-en-scène of the melodra-
matic “woman’s film.” The hybrid aesthetic work of the films reflects, I believe,
a deep and ongoing cultural engagement with the conflicted histories of empire
and nation of the twentieth century. Within this volume, Marischka’s/Romy
Schneider’s “Sissi” appears time and again as a cipher for modern conceptions
of Elisabeth across the globe. I offer this essay here as a reminder that popular
culture artifacts such as Marischka’s Sissi films may invite complicated modes
of pleasure and alienation that reflect the ongoing cultural work of national and
imperial memory and that can hence not be deemed simply regressive.
Within the landscape of West German and Austrian postwar cinema,
Ernst Marischka’s Sissi films of the 1950s—Sissi (1955), Sissi: Die junge
Kaiserin/Sissi: The Young Empress (1956), and Schicksalsjahre einer Kai-
serin/the Fateful Years of an Empress (1957)—have been simultaneously
amongst the most popular with moviegoers and the least revered by
1 Reproduced and modified with permission from Heidi Schlipphacke, “Mel-

ancholy Empress: Queering Empire in Ernst Marischka’s Sissi films,” Screen
51 (2010): 232–55. Permission granted by Oxford University Press on behalf of
Screen.
216 Sissi’s World
film critics. These films, which offer melodramatic renderings of the

courtship and marriage between Elisabeth of Bavaria (1837–1898) and
Franz Joseph (1830–1916), the Habsburg Emperor, have generally been
dismissed by film critics, considered to be popular Edelkitsch (noble
kitsch) and little more.2 Beloved in Germany and Austria alike to this
day, the Austrian/West German coproduction Sissi is screened bian-
nually on German television, and 10,000,000 people in West Germany
alone purchased tickets to see the film premiere in 1955.3 The films have
often been dismissed as aesthetically unimportant by critics of German
and Austrian cinema, and to the extent that they receive any treat-
ment from film scholars and cultural critics they are generally viewed
as being symptomatic of the kind of regressive politics one associates
with the Heimat (homeland) films of the 1950s, films that represented
a pastoral Germanic homeland as an antidote to burdensome national
histories. Shot in glossy Agfacolor film, the Sissi films are usually read
as representing a hybrid genre of Heimatfilm, historical drama, melo-
drama, and even fairytale: the innocent princess marries the Emperor,
and their union signifies a liaison between Germany and Austria that
reimagines the unsuccessful “marriage” between the two countries fol-
lowing Hitler’s annexation of Austria.
While such readings of the Sissi trilogy bring to light some of the
spectatorial desires in play on the part of diverse film audiences (1950s
West German and Austrian audiences as well as Germans and Austri-
ans in subsequent decades), this essay will propose a queer reading that
suggests that the Sissi films offer a complex cinematic text that calls
forth highly complicated modes of affect on the part of diverse film
audiences. I begin with the simple fact of the iconicity of “Sissi” and
the Sissi films within contemporary German and Austrian queer cul-
tures and link this queer reception to the mode of representation and
temporality of the films themselves. How do these films successfully
cross temporal boundaries, achieving immense popularity not only
with 1950s West German and Austrian audiences but also with contem-
porary German-speaking audiences? How do they travel so well across
diverse cultural milieus, attaining cult status with mainstream German
and Austrian audiences (and even with audiences across the West, with
the notable exception of the USA) as well as with contemporary Ger-
man and Austrian queer audiences? A queer reading of the narrative
and stylistic strategies within the films themselves offers a window into
2 Surprisingly, both Sissi: Die junge Kaiserin and Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin were
in competition at Cannes, the latter for the Palme d’Or.
3 The three Sissi films have only been available to home viewers in the USA since
September 2007, when they were released together as The Sissi Collection. Prior
to this, viewers could see only an English-language version entitled Sissi: Forever
My Love, which is an abridged version of all three films.
Queering Empire in Marischka’s Sissi Films 217
their surprising crosscultural appeal. I will argue here against the dom-
inant interpretation that the films represent a postwar return to political
and personal harmony; rather, the films reflect an anxiety about fixed
locations and stable notions of home. The restless heroine of the films,
Sissi herself, is constantly traveling, calling into question the presumed
needs of the Heimat audience. Indeed, I contend that the films offer
queer representations of time and space both formally and on the level
of narrative. What Lee Edelman calls the “reproductive futurity” of
heteronormative temporalities is consistently denied in the films’ story
due to Sissi’s repeated flights from the scene of the family.4 Formally,
the films offer modes of temporality that belie notions of linearity and
progress. In particular, all three films end with long, elaborate scenes of
spectacle, tableaux vivants of royal display that engage in a temporal
stretching that interrupts the flow of narrative, suspending the story in
a manner that privileges an atemporal allegorical pleasure over histori-
cal continuity. Rather than offering the simple pleasures of a fantasy of
national harmony to traumatized West German and Austrian specta-
tors, these films reflect deep-seated anxieties about home and historical
continuity that haunt post-Nazi Germany and Austria.
Appearing in 1955, 1956, and 1957, the Sissi films were among the
most popular films of the 1950s in both West Germany and Austria.
The premiere of the first film in the trilogy, Sissi, corresponded with the
signing of the Austrian Staatsvertrag (the first post-fascist Austrian con-
stitution) and a period of relative stability and financial prosperity in
Austria (due, in part, to the Marshall Plan and an expanded industrial
base).5 Austria had officially declared itself “neutral” in 1955, although
it retained certain sympathies with the highly contested region of South
Tyrol as well as with Hungary, both locations that are represented in
the Sissi films. Hungary is a central place of action in the second film
of the trilogy, the release date of which coincides with the brutal Soviet
intervention in the Hungarian revolution. Thus, although Austria was
officially neutral, Austrian sympathies, like those of Sissi herself, would
likely have fallen on the side of the Hungarian revolutionaries. The Sissi
films depict Sissi’s passionate attachment to Hungary and her impor-
tant role in the creation of a dual monarchy. Austrians likewise sympa-
thized with German-speaking Tyroleans, and the lovers Sissi and Franz
Joseph enjoy their honeymoon in the Tyrolean mountains in the second
film, The Young Empress. The emotions evoked in audiences at the time
likely ran, therefore, counter to the official neutrality of Austria. Perhaps
4 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004), 9.
5 See Barbara Jelavich, Modern Austria: Empire and Republic: 1815–1986 (Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 296.
218 Sissi’s World
more importantly, Austrians’ keen interest in South Tyrol potentially

undermined their conscious post-Nazi rejection of any “Germanic”
community predicated upon language and culture. Although Austri-
ans slipped relatively easily out of responsibility for Nazi war crimes,
the legacy of the unholy alliance between Germany and Austria during
World War II remained lodged in the cultural unconscious. (The first
official “apology” for Austrian complicity in Nazi war crimes was made
by Chancellor Franz Vranitzky in 1991.)
Unlike Austria, West Germany was put under intense international
pressure to admit to the crimes it had committed during the Nazi period.
However, by the 1950s, also with the help of the Marshall Fund, West
Germany was beginning to enjoy the economic prosperity that would
come to be coined the “economic miracle.” The year of Sissi’s release,
1955, marked not only the time of Austrian postwar independence but
also the beginning of German rearmament. Despite the pain of defeat
and humiliation after World War II, a renewed sense of national pride
was emerging in West Germany. In 1954 the West German football team
had defeated Hungary in the World Cup final, an event that is often
linked to the re-emergence of German nationalism. The Sissi films were
thus being screened to two audience groups who were trying to recon-
struct acceptable national narratives in the wake of partially repressed
histories of atrocities committed and the humiliation of defeat.
The three films detail the young adult life of Elisabeth of Bavaria,
beginning just before her marriage to the Emperor of the Habsburg
dynasty, Franz Joseph, in 1854 at the age of seventeen. The second film
of the trilogy, Sissi: the Young Empress, tells the story of Sissi’s early
years as an Empress and her difficulty in adjusting to the ceremonial
restrictions of the court. The central conflict of the film is the power
struggle between Sissi and her mother-in-law, Sophie, over Sissi’s first
child. When Sophie insists on taking charge of the child, Sissi rebels and
returns to her parents at Possenhofen, though, ultimately, she cannot
resist Franz Joseph and returns to Vienna, where she is able to forge
a reconciliation between the Hungarian rebels and the Austrian state
through her charm and empathy. Whereas the first film stages its finale
as a royal wedding between Sissi and Franz Joseph, the second film
ends with a journey through Hungary that culminates in a royal pro-
cession and the coronation of Sissi and Franz Joseph as monarchs of the
Austro-Hungarian empire. In the final film of the trilogy, Sissi: the Fate-
ful Years of an Empress, Sissi has given in to her fascination with Hun-
gary and spends a great deal of time with her admirer, the former rebel,
Count Andrassy. Sissi flees Hungary when Andrassy confesses his love
for her, only to discover that she is deathly ill with what is probably
tuberculosis. The remainder of the film takes place in various European
locations, such as Madeira and Corfu, as Sissi convalesces. Once she
has recovered her health, she travels with Franz Joseph to Italy, where
the royal couple is highly unpopular (unlike the Sissi films, which were
hugely popular in Italy). The Fateful Years of an Empress ends with a lav-
ish procession in Venice during which the Italian people greet the mon-
archs with hostility. It is only when the Italians view Sissi’s reunion
with her young daughter Marie in Venice that they warm to the royal
couple. Hence, what are usually billed as kitsch Heimat films actually
represent a heroine who, like the historical figure she represents, expe-
riences multiple humiliations and displacements.
What I identify as my queer reading of Sissi goes both with and
against the grain, for “Sissi” is today simultaneously a cherished Ger-
man/Austrian heroine and a queer icon. Sissi performances are com-
mon at drag balls and queer celebrations such as Christopher Street
Day. In this context, the historical myth of Sissi expands the film text:
Elisabeth of Austria’s murder by a young anarchist in Geneva in 1898,
her obsession with beauty and hair, and her purported anorexia all
contribute to the myth of the melancholy Empress. The contemporary
queer reception of Sissi is certainly aided by this myth as well as by
the tragic life of the actress Romy Schneider, the much loved star of the
Sissi films. Schneider famously turned her back on her Sissi role later
in her career, moving to France and making art films. Like Elisabeth of
Austria, she suffered the death of her son at an early age and her own
life ended tragically at the age of forty-four in a possible drug-induced
suicide. Indeed, both Sissi and Schneider are often memorialized along
with Lady Diana, another tragic royal figure who has attained cult sta-
tus in queer communities. Schneider even played the role of Manuela
von Meinhardis, the boarding-school girl in love with her female
teacher, in the 1958 remake of Mädchen in Uniform (Géza von Radványi),
and Schneider also revised the role of the Empress Elisabeth in Luchino
Visconti’s Ludwig (1972), a film that portrays the homoerotic fantasies
of King Ludwig of Bavaria, Sissi’s cousin. As in the case of Mädchen in
Uniform, Ludwig retroactively links Schneider and Sissi to queer texts.6
Indeed, the Sissi films perform a dual gesture of “straight” affect and
queer displacements of scenes of heterosexual harmony. They engage
liberally in an aesthetics of performance, often juxtaposing the natural
and the artificial—a mode of aesthetics associated with the tenets of
6 See Claudia Breger, Szenarien kopfloser Herrschaft—Performanzen gespenstischer

Macht: Königsfiguren in der deutschsprachigen Literatur und Kultur des 20. Jahrhun-
derts (Freiburg: Rombach, 2004). Breger codes Ludwig as a new kind of “queer”
king (194–227). One could also retroactively read Karlheinz Böhm, the actor who
portrays Franz Joseph, as a queerable icon; he not only starred in the infamous
film about the perverse voyeur, Peeping Tom (Michael Power, 1960), but also in
R.W. Fassbinder’s Faustrecht der Freiheit/Fox and His Friends (1975) in which he
plays a gay playboy.
220 Sissi’s World
camp. Yet at the same time the affective tenor of the films is serious: Sis-
si’s joys and crises are the emotional center of the films so that a straight
reception, so to speak, is in keeping with the melodramatic arc of the
films themselves. For all of the representational excess in the form of
lavish royal processions and ceremonies, the films nevertheless provide
a narrative with which diverse postwar audiences can identify. In this
sense, I do not read the Sissi trilogy as a merely queer performance of
excess. Rather, I will suggest avenues into a queer reading that high-
light the mood of melancholy and loss that characterizes these films.
These avenues include the interruption of linearity and the curtailed
reproduction of the heterosexual family, the aesthetics of performativ-
ity, queer readings of travel and nation, and the final tableaux vivants
of royal display.
The word queer is a cognate of the German word quer, which points
to the askance or skewed quality of a relationship. Hence, queerness
is not simply oppositional but rather, as argued by Dana Luciano,
obliquely related to “normative modes of synching individual, famil-
ial, and historical time.”7 Queerness effects, then, a displacement of
sorts. And it is precisely the affect and aesthetics of displacement that
are staged in the Sissi films. I propose here that the melancholia asso-
ciated with the repeated suspension of harmony and resolution in the
films can be linked simultaneously to a queer affective mode and to
one that characterizes the former Nazi nations of Germany and Aus-
tria. Heather Love has pointed to the mood of melancholy in modernist
texts concerned with queerness and to the particular pain associated
with the impossible love of queer desire.8 Indeed, one could argue for
a metonymic relationship between queerness and melancholy. Queer
love is, by definition, melancholy, for the relationship to the object is
always shrouded in ambivalence in contemporary western cultures
that do not recognize these relationships as equal. And melancholia,
according to Freud, is a displaced form of mourning, a mourning that
never ends because the melancholic is so far removed from the object of
loss that he is not sure what has been lost: “This would suggest that mel-
ancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn
from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there
is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.”9 For Freud, melancho-
lia is characterized by a loss that remains undefined, by ambivalent
7 Dana Luciano, “Coming Around Again: The Queer Momentum of Far From
Heaven,” Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 13, no. 2–3 (2007): 250.
8 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
9 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth, 1957), 245.
feelings towards the object of loss, and by the regression of the libido
into the ego. It is a death drive, as the ambivalent feelings toward the
object of loss remain repressed and are turned in upon the self. As in
the case of mourning, melancholia is characterized by an inability to
act or engage with the outside world, but, unlike in mourning, feelings
of ambivalence towards the object of loss (which could be an abstract
idea or projection) lead to self-punishment and the festering of a nar-
cissistic wound. The melancholic tends to suicide, to sadism, to sleep-
lessness, and to anorexia. The “open wound”10 can never be healed; it
remains partially disavowed, unrecognized, and hence fosters repeti-
tion and displacements. If the structure of mourning is one of a slow,
linear detachment from the object of loss, the structure of melancholia
is rather one of repetition and suspension. As Klaus Mladek and George
Edmondson put it: “Something lacks, is insufficient, is not right, is out
of joint. Melancholia suspends the verdict of reality that the object no
longer exists.”11 In the case of queer melancholia, repression leads to
ambivalence and shame.
The former Nazi nations of Germany and Austria are subject to
their own brand of melancholia. In 1967, Alexander and Margarethe
Mitscherlich famously proposed an analysis of post-fascist German
culture in their study The Inability to Mourn.12 Here, German culture
was theorized as a space of losses that could never be mourned due
to the guilt of the fathers of the nation. If the crimes of the fathers
were unspeakable, then their deaths could not be mourned. Germany,
then, was doomed to a state of melancholy, caught between denial and
mourning. As Eric Santner has argued, it is through the father, Lacan’s
paternal signfier, that “all mourning must pass.”13 Yet Santner points
out that this figure presents a barrier to mourning in postwar Germany
and Austria, where the fathers themselves, and the nations for which
they stand, are responsible for the traumas of the children, traumas
which are “transmitted to the second and third generations.”14 Since
mourning is blocked, melancholia becomes an affective and structural
mode that is built into post-Nazi German and Austrian cultural prod-
ucts, one that speaks to the citizens of post-Nazi nations without ever
clearly naming the object of loss. Rather, melancholia reproduces itself
10 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 253.

11 Klaus Mladek and George Edmondson, “A Politics of Melancholia,” in A Leftist
Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics, ed. Carsten Strathausen (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 211.
12 Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern,
Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: Piper, 1967).
13 Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 101.
14 Santner, Stranded Objects, 35.
222 Sissi’s World
via repression and ambivalence indefinitely from generation to gener-

ation. Thus, although radically different in content, the melancholy of
queer loss mirrors the post-fascist inability to mourn theorized by the
Mitscherlichs. After all, queer loss has historically been neither named
nor mourned. It is, according to Love, characterized by shame, an emo-
tion that reflects the self-punishing structure of melancholia.
Herein lie some of the affective and aesthetic overlappings that
render the Sissi films so important both for mainstream German and
Austrian film audiences in the 1950s and beyond and for contemporary
queer audiences. But melancholy should not only be understood as an
illness. Even Freud admits that “the self-tormenting in melancholia” is
“without doubt enjoyable.”15 There is a pleasure in displacement, rep-
etition and suspension. As Carol Flinn argues, the state of melancholy
and not mourning is conducive to aesthetic work:
It can be argued that hysterics, mourners, and melancholics are

all people who remember too much. Specialists in the past, they
are consummate historians. Yet only the mourner gets it right, by
any conventional measure. For this reason, I believe that those
who “get it wrong” may have more to offer. For melancholia
acknowledges the impossibility of overcoming the past—and
even questions the desirability of doing so.16
In this sense, melancholia is an ethical stance, the refusal to heal wounds.

It is potentially productive, even enjoyable. The affect of melancholia
I ascribe to the Sissi films takes cognizance of such an understanding
of melancholia; melancholia is about loss. The structure of melancholia
enhances and suspends the feeling of loss and, in so doing, offers relief.
Via the narrative of the “melancholy empress” and the formal structures
of suspension, allegory, and temporal stretching, the Sissi films stage
melancholia, offering a queer mirror to radically diverse cultural groups.
An initial route of access to queer readings of the Sissi trilogy is
via its camp qualities of performativity and artificiality. In its hyper-
performance of reality, camp always emphasizes a gap between signi-
fier and signified, and is thus always also about loss. Yet it would be
myopic to link queer aesthetics and spectatorship exclusively to notions
of camp. As Luciano argues in her reading of Todd Haynes’s homage to
Douglas Sirk, Far From Heaven (2002), queer affect is produced through
a combination of excess and straightness. In this sense, it is important to
open up the discussion beyond the discourse of “camp” most famously
15 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 251.

16 Caryl Flinn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 55.
begun by Susan Sontag in her “Notes on Camp” (1966). Queer theorists

are ambivalent about this text for although Sontag puts homosexuality
and queerness on the aesthetic map, she also trivializes what she sees as
a “homosexual aesthetic.” While Sontag admits that “not all homosex-
uals have Camp taste,” she nevertheless asserts that homosexuals “by
and large, constitute the vanguard—and the most articulate audience—
of Camp.”17 Camp art is, for Sontag, “decorative art, emphasizing tex-
ture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content.”18 Camp art
depoliticizes, and hence it is often concerned with history, approaching
the past sentimentally.19 And while Sontag admits that a camp eye can
“transform experience,” she nevertheless asserts that “not everything
can be seen as Camp. It’s not all in the eye of the beholder.”20 So while
Sontag tends to ally a homosexual aesthetic with camp as hyperper-
formativity and artifice, the link between the campness of the artwork
and the queerness of the beholder cannot be assumed, suggesting that
texts might perform their queerness even without the help of the queer
eye. It is statements such as this that make Sontag’s text still relevant,
for the question of the performance of the text is at the crux of contem-
porary discussions of queer textualities.
Yet, as I have already suggested, hyperperformance and excess are
only part of the picture, and this is where Sontag’s treatise reaches
its limits. She asserts that camp “objects and persons” are predicated
upon artifice: “Nothing in nature can be campy.”21 A queer aesthetic,
however, often relies on the interplay between artifice and nature, ulti-
mately complicating the distinction and highlighting the unbreach-
able abyss between the two. In this sense, a queer reading relies on
the frame that circumscribes the “natural.” Within the Sissi films the
dichotomy between nature and artifice is consistently undermined.
Ultimately, excess and straightness go hand in hand; Sissi’s natural-
ness calls attention to its own frame. For post-1966 queer audiences this
gap screams camp, while 1950s Austrian and West German audiences
would be familiar with an aesthetics of excess via their own film histo-
ries. As Andrea Lang and Franz Marksteiner have shown, Austrian cin-
ema in particular is characterized precisely by the opulence of images
used (borrowed from films based on operettas and on the Habsburg
court), a “Catholic taste for self-indulgent imagery,” by a fixation with
the myth of the Habsburg dynasty and with “emblematic natural
17 Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, 1966), 290.
18 Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 278.
19 As Heather Love has put it, with “its refusal to get over childhood pleasures and
traumas,” camp “is a backward art.” Love, Feeling Backward, 7.
224 Sissi’s World
environments.”22 All of these elements, as Lang and Marksteiner point

out, are present in spades in the Sissi films. As Robert von Dassanowsky
shows, the Sissi films “recalled the elegant orchestration of the Viennese
film.”23 Indeed, Thomas Elsaesser argues that the city of Vienna has
been coded cinematically as “transparent duplicity,”24 that is, as a space
that relishes the revelation of the gap between signifier and signified
that is revealed in hyperperformance and excess. Here, then, is another
moment of crosscultural (mainstream/queer) pleasure and recognition
afforded by the Sissi films.
The first time the spectator sees Sissi she is spiritedly riding a horse,
cheered on by her admiring father. She then begins to care for the ani-
mals (birds and a fawn) that reside in various cages in front of the house.
Here it becomes clear that Sissi’s naturalness is constructed within a
number of frames: the frames of the birdcage (Figure 9.1) and the pen
Figure 9.1 Ernst Marischka, Sissi (film): Sissi: Sissi feeds the caged birds
at Possenhofen.
22 Andrea Lang and Franz Marksteiner, “Im Schatten seiner Majestät: Überlegun-
gen zum österreichischen Nachkriegsfilm,” Blimp 32 (1995): 30.
23 Robert Von Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema: a History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2005), 161.
24 Thomas Elsaesser, “Make-Believe Vienna and Matter-of-Fact Berlin: Walter
Reisch and Das Lied ist aus,” in Vienna Meets Berlin: Cultural Interaction 1918–
1933, ed. John Warren and Ulrike Zitzlsperber (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 222.
in which the fawn is kept, and even the perfectly tailored riding outfit
Sissi wears during her “wild” ride.
Hence, while the film ostensibly contrasts the artificial and formal
world of the Austrian court with Sissi’s joyful and natural childhood
in Possenhofen, this dichotomy is already complicated early in the first
Sissi film. Not only are the animals domesticated and caged, but Sissi
likewise takes great pleasure in the containment of nature. In the second
film of the trilogy, Sissi: the Young Empress, Sissi’s father, Duke Max of
Bavaria, tells his wife that Sissi “is sitting in a golden cage.” While this
statement could be seen as a veiled critique of the formal court rules
to which Sissi is forced to conform, it metonymically and symbolically
links Sissi to the birdcage from the beginning of the original film, a cage
to which—we learn in Sissi: the Young Empress—the birds have returned
of their own accord after having been set free upon Sissi’s departure.
Hence, nature only exists as a frame, as a citation of an imagined natu-
ralness free from artifice.
The non-dialectical interplay between nature and artifice in the Sissi
films complicates their categorization as traditional Heimat films. The
first film of the trilogy, Sissi, retains elements of the Heimatfilm genre
to which it is indebted, such as the idealization of a pastoral Germanic
nature and an ambivalent engagement with modernity.25 It begins with
an idyllic establishing shot of the lake at Sissi’s childhood home, Pos-
senhofen. The camera then pans to the left to reveal the mountains and
the family house. We hear the music of yodelers, the sound of the Aus-
trian and Bavarian mountain idylls of the classic Heimatfilm. Children
enter the screen, playing and fishing in the lake. It is from the perspec-
tive of a yodeler on a raft that we are first introduced to the Duke, as the
two greet one another. In this way, the opening sequence of Sissi offers
a quintessential Heimat scene.
The Heimatfilm is, according to Elsaesser, “Germany’s only indige-
nous and historically most enduring genre.”26 Celia Applegate traces
the history of the Heimat genre to questions of national identity in the
nineteenth century. Applegate argues that, within the German context,
the drama of national identity is played out in the space of the local;
the Heimat novel and film dramatize the interplay between these two
modes of identity, local and national.27 As Johannes von Moltke points
out, Heimat is an overburdened term, signifying the loss of innocence,
alienation, premodern ideals and a romantic notion of the simple
25 As Johannes von Moltke puts it, the Heimat genre both “glorifies the past and
celebrates modernity.” No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 15.
26 Cited in von Moltke, No Place Like Home, 3.
27 Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990).
226 Sissi’s World
country life.28 Von Moltke suggests that West German cinema turned
“inward” in the 1950s as a response to the US occupation of both the
nation and its cinema.29 The tropes of the Heimatfilm are, then, utopian
Alpine scenes, simple country folk in traditional dress, and the preser-
vation of conservative morals. It is precisely the stability of the local and
of nature that offers a defence against the infringement of the foreign.
Von Moltke cites Sissi as a quintessential example of the Heimat mantra,
as the heroine quotes the comforting words of her father: “Should your
life ever bring trouble or sorrow, then go through the woods with open
eyes. In every tree and brush, in every flower and every animal you
will observe the omnipotence of God, which will give you solace and
strength.”30 Here, Sissi reiterates the central Heimat tenet of the return to
an innocent and unchanging nature.
The idyllic Heimat panorama and iterations, such as Papili’s nature
mantra cited above, code the Sissi trilogy as Heimat films. Yet the Hei-
mat cues in the Sissi films are ultimately compromised in each instance.
Indeed, even in the most classical example of Heimat within the trilogy,
the opening sequence of the film, Sissi is introduced to the film audience
through a highly theatrical mode of staging and framing. The heroine
enters the idyllic Heimat scene on a “wild” horse, and is already framed
in multiple ways in this initial scene. Sissi’s family has been eating, and
father and mother discuss Franz Joseph, the nephew of Sissi’s mother,
with an emissary who arrives to drink with the Duke. The two clink
glasses to “the future Empress of Austria,” followed by a cut to Sissi,
framed by the idyllic setting of the mountains and lake, squealing with
delight as she jumps over a fence. At this moment, all activity at the
family table stops and the parents jump to attention, asking, “Wasn’t
that Sissi?” This is the frame through which Sissi and the emerging star
Romy Schneider are introduced to the spectators. Sissi’s mother, played
by Schneider’s real-life mother, Magda Schneider, complains that Sissi
is probably “riding that wild horse again,” and we are then treated to
a long shot of Sissi riding towards the camera. Her parents run to the
garden to watch their daughter together, framed by the house, greenery,
and roses. The ideal family of the Heimat world of Possenhofen is sub-
ject to theatrical framing from the outset, modeling the wonder of the
spectator who witnesses the arrival of Sissi.
The introduction of Schneider is thus reminiscent of Vivien Leigh’s
carefully choreographed emergence as a star in Gone With the Wind, as
described by Tom Brown.31 Brown details the hotly anticipated moment
28 Von Moltke, No Place Like Home, 8.

31 Tom Brown, “Spectacle/Gender/History: The Case of Gone With the Wind,”
Screen 49, no. 2 (2008): 157–78.
of Leigh’s appearance in the film, as her admirer, Brent Tarleton, moves

to the side so that the spectator gains a first view of the star. Interest-
ingly, Brown links this moment to the theatricality of the setting of Leni
Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, in which the Führer is introduced in
a plane through parting clouds.32 In Sissi, the spectator is first shown
Schneider’s star performance via the parents, who watch from a kind
of special box in the theater. The connection to Gone With the Wind is
warranted: Sissi/Schneider emerges as star text in a manner similar
to Leigh, while both films are historical dramas that were immensely
popular with the public yet generally panned by critics. Brown cites
Thomas Schatz, who calls Gone With the Wind “our proverbial 800-
pound gorilla—an oversized nuisance that simply won’t go away and
an obvious menace to our carefully constructed habitat.”33 Schatz’s dra-
matic characterization of Gone With the Wind encapsulates the problems
that Sissi created for Schneider in particular. Ernst Marischka wanted
to make a fourth film, but Schneider was determined to escape from
the “golden cage” of her Sissi role. As Mary Wauchope points out, the
general sentiment of the 1950s was that “Romy didn’t play Sissi—she
was Sissi!”34 The containment of the “nature child” Sissi is mirrored in
the claustrophobic framing of Schneider.
Tropes of framing and entrapment delimit Sissi’s movement through-
out the trilogy. Having arrived in Vienna for the wedding, she portrays
a sense of entrapment as she runs through Schönbrunn looking out of
each window for “the animals.” Similarly, Sissi keeps a parrot in her
own rooms at the court, and her father’s comment about her living in a
golden cage follows a scene in which Sissi has given Franz Joseph a pres-
ent for their four-week anniversary—a painting divided into framed
sections depicting various locations of interest in the Vienna area. Sissi
is fascinated by this representation and, in particular, by the framing of
nature in the form of little painted trees. Hence, although presumably
concerned in large part with the goal of undermining the hyper-formal
Spanish Court rules followed at Schönbrunn, Sissi’s desires are nev-
ertheless perfectly met by the little framed images of Vienna and its
parks. Although the film invites us to contrast the free-spirited Sissi of
the first film with the somewhat alienated and ill Sissi of the final film,
the complex interplay between nature and artifice is already laid out
early in the trilogy.
32 Brown, “Spectacle/Gender/History,” 170.

34 Mary Wauchope, “Sissi Revisited,” in Literature, Film and the Culture Industry in
Contemporary Austria, ed. Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger (New York: Peter Lang,
2002), 180.
228 Sissi’s World
In the second and third Sissi films, the representations of landscapes

and outdoor spaces appear ever more like stage settings. The stylized
images of the stations of Sissi’s travels, such as Corfu and Madeira,
recall the representational excess that characterizes the images of nature
captured in Sissi’s wedding gift. Sissi is sent to these exotic locations
due to her illness, presumably tuberculosis, in The Fateful Years of an
Empress, and these outdoor scenes are staged in a manner that belies
any organic notion of nature. In Madeira, Sissi’s sickbed has been
placed on a romantic and exotic hill overlooking the sea. The Agfacolor
print highlights the brilliant colors of the scenery, yet these images are
jarring, as the sickbed seems to have been carried to the most popu-
lar tourist spot in Madeira (Figure 9.2). Public and private, the exotic
and the domestic coexist in hyperdramatic mode. Shots of the recover-
ing Sissi with her mother, lady-in-waiting and escort (Oberst Böckl) in
Corfu likewise appear completely artificial. The Austrian court is rep-
resented here in the warm Mediterranean light, standing amidst the
columns of Greek ruins.
The scenes in Corfu and Madeira are reminiscent of the carefully
choreographed melodramatic tableaux vivants of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, which displayed the feminine in exotic locations
in the salon cultures of the Germanic states. Within these tableaux
vivants, the female figure stands allegorically for renunciation on an
Figure 9.2 The Fateful Years of an Empress: Sissi’s sickbed in Madeira.

overcoded stage containing multiple classical symbols.35 Peter McIsaac

points to the “juxtapositions of seemingly disparate cultural catego-
ries” in the famous performances of Henriette Hendel-Schütz during
Goethe’s time.36 Audiences of the period also regarded “tableaux as an
art form that co-mingles public and private realms.”37 Particularly in
the sickbed scenes in Madeira, categories of private and public are no
longer relevant and any semblance of realism is thrown to the wind. The
scenes in Madeira and Corfu likewise highlight the hybrid nature of the
Sissi films and the multiple modes of access the films offer to straight
and queer spectators across the decades. The travel scenes in Corfu and
Madeira resemble similar ones in the popular travel films (Urlaubsfilme)
of the time38 and in the exotic West German thrillers and adventure
films that became popular in the 1960s.39 The opening sequence, nature
shots, and family narrative reflect elements of the Heimatfilm. Yet the
films likewise embody the spectacle of excess of the Habsburg court
and the opera so that the contemporary spectator can respond to these
images in a manner that is simultaneously camp (queer) and straight
(local).
The complex nexus of nature/artifice that can be said to queer the
Sissi films is recalled in one of the many citations of Sissi from queer
and popular culture,40 the story of the Schwulendemo (gay demonstra-
tion) from the German graphic novelist Ralph König’s Prall aus dem
Leben. In this narrative, four gay men pull up at an Autobahn rest stop
on their way to a Schwulendemo (gay demonstration) in Hamburg to
change into drag.41 The first issue at stake is who will wear the “Sis-
si-dress” to the demo, and a fight ensues amongst the four (Figure 9.3).
They then decide to park directly in front of the restaurant rather than
hiding behind a truck in order to change into their drag outfits. Thus
the comic-strip frames depict alternately, and sometimes in the same
frame, the cross-dressing queers and the presumably “natural” space
of the restaurant. The Sissi-dress serves as an object of camp delight as
well as one that inspires feelings of reverence. Whoever wears the dress
35 See Peter M. McIsaac, “Rethinking Tableaux Vivants and Triviliality in the

Writings of Johann Wolfgang von Geothe, Johanna Schopenhauer and Fanny
Lewald,” Monatsfhefte 99, no. 2 (2007): 152–76.
36 McIsaac, “Rethinking Tableaux Vivants,” 156.
37 McIsaac, “Rethinking Tableaux Vivants,” 157.
38 Lang and Marksteiner compare the tableaux in the Sissi films to those in the
travel films of the Austrian director Franz Antel. Lang and Marksteiner, “Im
Schatten seiner Majestät,” 30.
39 See Tim Bergfelder, International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and Euro-
pean Co-Productions in the 1960s (New York: Berghahn, 2005).
40 Most recently, the parodist Michael “Bully” Herbig has created a popular ani-
mated parody of the Sissi films, Lissi und der wilde Kaiser (2007).
41 Ralf König, Prall aus dem Leben (Hamburg: Carlsen, 1989), 39–41.
230 Sissi’s World
Figure 9.3 Ralf König, Prall aus dem Leben: “The dress is much too big for
your chicken breast. You should give it to me!” “It doesn’t suit you. You
wear glasses. You will never look like Sissi!” Courtesy of Ralf König.
is, by virtue of its citation of Sissi, metonymically coded as beautiful.

As an artifact the dress connotes both premodern naturalness and the
playful artifice of the crossdresser, recalling the complex play of nature
and the frame in the Sissi films. In the end, one of the men accidentally
locks the car keys in the trunk and crisis ensues. The dialectic between
the “natural” world of the people in the restaurant (who stare unabash-
edly at the men in drag) and the “performative” world of the queers
is simultaneously heightened and undermined by the very real prob-
lem of getting access to the keys in the trunk. The graphic novel genre
highlights the artificial through its disinterest in realism and its com-
plex methods of framing, which automatically denaturalize whatever
is depicted in the frame.
König’s text is a brilliant sendup of the complex dynamic between
nature and artifice as well as of the multicoded nature of a Sissi-dress
in contemporary German-language queer culture. Likewise, the notion
of performativity, a staple element of definitions of queer identities,
is framed multiple times since it is not only the group of queer men
that hyperperforms femininity but also the text of the Sissi-dress itself
which signifies a framed naturalness regardless of who wears it. Just
as the Sissi-dress is a standard feature of German drag shows, so do
drag performances abound within the Sissi trilogy, as Claudia Breger

has pointed out.42 Sissi herself plays the role of a ordinary woman in her
chance meeting with Franz Joseph while fishing at Bad Ischl. She has
traveled to Bad Ischl with her mother and sister, Nene, since Nene is to
be betrothed to the Emperor, unbeknownst to Sissi. Sissi “escapes” from
her rooms at the palace in order to go fishing, and it is at the lake that
she meets and seduces Franz Joseph in her simple attire. There is no
clear motive for her performance, as she would presumably be greeted
warmly by the Emperor were she to reveal her true identity. But perfor-
mance is simply second nature for Sissi. And this ultimately gratuitous
game of deceit is repeated many times within the three Sissi films. In
The Young Empress, Sissi and Franz Joseph both assume non-aristocratic
identities while honeymooning in a mountain hut in South Tyrol, per-
forming the role of commoners to the particular delight of Sissi herself.
Foregoing servants for the evening, Sissi claims that she is a “perfect
housewife,” having once made breakfast while on vacation with her
mother, and plays this role with glee as she shines Franz’s shoes the
next morning.
In the Sissi films, drag is immediately identifiable to all actors as per-
formance. Outside of the idealized space of Possenhofen, none of the
central figures in the films is satisfied with the identities ascribed to
them, and drag performances highlight the melancholy nature of the
ruling class, even when these rulers are represented as ideal models
of a benevolent power system. In The Fateful Years of an Empress the
performance of “commonness” by Sissi and Franz in the previous film
is reversed: the servants of the Italian aristocracy impersonate their
employers at a gala in Milan for the Emperor and Empress that the local
aristocracy has refused to attend in protest of the foreign rulers. The
camera lingers on the awkward bows and curtseys of the bakers and
tailors and on the simple conversation of the crossdressing servants,
emphasizing the anxiety that surrounds identity within the films. The
scene at La Scala opens with the entrance of the servants into the opera
house, focusing on their uncouth behavior (sharing sandwiches, talking
loudly), so that the disparity between signifier (theatergoers in formal
attire) and signified (the presumed aristocracy) is quickly apparent to
the spectator. As if to drive the point home, the La Scala scene includes
a dialogue between an emissary of the court and the mayor of Milan in
which they discuss how to rescue the situation to the satisfaction of the
Emperor and the Empress. Just as in the earlier instances of drag in the
42 Claudia Breger points to the drag scene in Italy in which servants take on the
identities of their employers, as well as to the identities of Sissi as “tomboy,” in
the image of her father, and Franz-Joseph as “mama’s boy.” Breger, Szenarien
kopfloser Herrschaft, 183–8.
232 Sissi’s World
Sissi films (Sissi’s performance as the ordinary woman or as “the perfect

housewife”), the inauthenticity of the identity is obvious. Sissi herself
seems to enjoy the drag theater, insisting on being introduced to each of
the servants who are impersonating their aristocratic employers.
The function of this scene in the film cannot easily be explained in
narrative terms.43 Sissi has recovered from her illness and immediately
resumes her royal duties, accompanying Franz Joseph on a trip through
Italy, where the royal couple is extremely unpopular. Why is Sissi’s
miraculous recovery followed immediately by a trip away from Vienna,
to a hostile territory? And why is the La Scala scene, at about ten min-
utes, so long? I would argue that narrative becomes increasingly unim-
portant in this final film of the trilogy; rather, it is characterized by a
structure of melancholy, restlessness, and alienation. The scene at La
Scala simultaneously points to the fragility of identity and to the inevi-
table downfall of the Habsburg monarchy. Hence, the slippage between
the Italian aristocracy and their servants is mirrored in the fragile hold
on power by the Austrian monarchs themselves. The final scenes of The
Fateful Years of an Empress depict the indignities to which Franz Joseph
and Sissi are subject as unpopular monarchs, and a stable notion of
home is all but deconstructed in this film. Rather, the Sissi films teach
the spectator the lesson that all identity is failed performance and that
home is a circumscribed and alienating concept.
The drag performances of the servants in La Scala are intercut with
scenes depicting the aristocratic employers themselves, scenes which
engage in a queering not only of class but of national identity. The
noblewoman Beatrice complains about having to fetch her own wine
from the cellar in the absence of her servants, admitting that she would
have liked to attend the opera after all. When her husband complains
that her desire to see the Habsburg Emperor and Empress is a form
of treason (“You are after all an Italian!”), the noblewoman responds
that she is something of a “mixture”: “Yes, I was born in Hungary.
My mother was Polish. My father was Russian. My grandmother was
Swedish. A great uncle of mine was supposedly even an Eskimo.” Not
only are Sissi and Franz Joseph strangers in their own empire; the Ital-
ian nationalists are likewise unable to rely on a stable national identity.
The Fateful Years of an Empress, and the trilogy itself, ends with scenes
of humiliation and alienation in Italy. Rather than singing the imperial
anthem of the Habsburgs (a hymn which was written by Joseph Haydn
and which was subsequently chosen as the German national anthem),
the Italians insist on singing a Verdi aria, thereby foreshadowing the
inevitable decline of the Habsburg monarchy. The appearance of the
43 Breger argues that this is a conservative moment in the film, as the depiction of
the servants is unflattering. Breger, Szenarien kopfloser Herrschaft, 187.
royal couple at La Scala in Milan is followed by a trip to Venice, and

this journey is likewise characterized by hostility from the Italians and
humiliation for the monarchs. As the couple sails to Venice the crowds
shun them, closing their shutters as the royal pair passes by. The Italians
are moved only when they witness Sissi embracing her child after a
long separation. Aside from this moment, Sissi is alienated within Italy;
indeed, her numerous travels never assuage her Wanderlust. Hence,
although the Sissi films have generally been classified as historical dra-
mas and Heimatfilm, they seem rather to dramatize a crisis of homeless-
ness than to celebrate the pre-Nazi German and Austrian homelands.
Johannes von Moltke has argued that the Heimatfilm depicts not only
“home” itself but also the departure from and return to home. Without
the motif of departure, home is indefinable: “The value of Heimat can
only be known by those who have left it.”44 Sissi is a Bavarian girl, yet
she returns there only once, immediately after her wedding, and is una-
ble to regain her equilibrium in this space once she has left it. Yet she
experiences great homesickness in her adopted Heimat of Austria. She
is fascinated with Hungary, the space of the final tableau of the second
film. Sissi spends a great deal of time in Hungary in The Fateful Years
of an Empress, and history tells us that Elisabeth of Austria loved this
country. Yet Sissi’s fondness for Hungary is never clearly motivated in
the films. Early on in The Young Empress Sissi proclaims to her language
teacher: “I don’t know why, but I am more attracted to Hungary than
to any other country, even though I’ve never been there!” In this way,
the denaturalization of the space of Heimat in Possenhofen in the open-
ing sequence of the first Sissi film leads to ever more alienation in the
subsequent scenes and films. Sissi is only able to imagine Heimat as an
abstraction, a place she has never visited.
The nation of Hungary functions as a triangulating space for the
forged reconciliation between Austria and Germany. What could be
seen as a dramatization, in the 1950s, of a more desirable “marriage”
between Germany and Austria in the form of Sissi’s triumphant jour-
ney down the Danube as the future Habsburg queen, turns out to be
one of many scenes of conflicted national posturing. The end of the first
Sissi film depicts the Empress sailing to her new Heimat of Austria, fol-
lowed by an elaborate wedding procession. In the next film Sissi and
Franz travel triumphantly to Hungary for their coronation as the dual
monarchs of Austria and the kingdom of Hungary. And the final film
ends with the coolly received arrival of the royal couple in Venice. In
this way, national and familial identities are consistently triangulated
and displaced. The family of the Haus Österreich (the house of Austria)
is so big as to contain entire countries that reject the monarchs. Sissi is

234 Sissi’s World
expected to learn all of the languages of these wayward “children,” and

yet she never regains a sense of Heimat following the opening scenes of
the trilogy. Rather, she travels incessantly and compulsively after the
birth of her first child, unable to feel at home anywhere. She embodies
the restless traveler, at odds with the traditional female identity. In her
incognito meeting with Franz Joseph at Ischl, she pulls out her zither,
telling him the story of how her father taught her to play it, and of how
he was a great traveler: “Suddenly something inside makes him get up
and go. I think I’ll be just like him one day.” When Sissi becomes ill with
a lung infection, she is not told to lie in bed but rather that she needs a
change of climate. Sissi travels to Corfu and Madeira, where she says
what she would “most of all love” is not to return home to her husband
and daughter, but “to take a long journey by sea.”
Sissi’s Wanderlust destabilizes not only national but also gender
identities in the film. The figure of the traveling woman stands in con-
trast to the housebound Emperor. While his wife travels, Franz Joseph
usually sits at home at his desk, a gigantic framed picture of a matri-
arch (Maria Theresa) placed behind him (Figure 9.4). Hence, the mise-
en-scène associated with Franz Joseph could be linked to what Tom
Brown has defined as a feminized “décor of history”: “The décor of
history is an excess of detail: detail in the mise-en-scène (décor, but
Figure 9.4 The Fateful Years of an Empress: Franz Joseph at his desk.
also costume) that is excessive to the requirement of historical ver-

isimilitude.”45 The painting of the matriarch threatens to overpower
Franz Joseph in these scenes, diminishing his stature. A smaller paint-
ing of Sissi is displayed to the side of Franz Joseph’s desk, and the
spectator is occasionally granted an oblique view of this picture. The
paintings stage the power dynamics between the two women, over-
coding the scenes with Franz Joseph, interrupting the verisimilitude of
the Emperor at work and offering contradictory significations of these
scenes. Brown uses the notion of the “décor of history” to describe
the space of femininity in historical dramas, in contrast to what he
calls “the spectacular vista” of the masculine historical gaze.46 While
Sissi travels, gazing over the beautiful vistas of Hungary, Madeira,
and Corfu, Franz Joseph is housebound; the queering of gender roles
occurs in the case of both the Emperor and the Empress in the Sissi
films.
This reversal of gender roles in the Sissi films has profound conse-
quences for the relations between states. Sissi’s unique contribution
to politics is usually effected through the queering of gender roles,
as in the scene in which she reconciles the rebel Hungarians with the
Austrian court through the anti-traditional device of the Damenwahl
(ladies’ choice). By choosing the passionate nationalist Hungarian
Count Andrassy as her dance partner at a formal ball, Sissi reconciles
the parent and rebel states. However, Sissi’s effectiveness is ultimately
the product of her dangerous behavior. Her popularity in Hungary is
mediated by Andrassy, who has fallen madly in love with her. Thus,
the reconciliation between these two nations is predicated upon the
unstable ground of inappropriate romantic love. Indeed, within the
trilogy, romantic triangulations abound. Just as Hungary triangulates
the marriage between Germany and Habsburg Austria, Andrassy trian-
gulates the marriage between Sissi and Franz Joseph, even physically
standing between them in the final tableau in Hungary in The Young
Empress. For his part, Franz Joseph engages in romantic triangulation
through his rejection of Sissi’s sister Nene, who ostensibly forgives Sissi
for “stealing” Franz Joseph in the first film only to respond to Franz
Joseph’s question in the final film as to why she has never married with
the following confession: “I will never love another man the way I have
loved you.” The trope of impossible love that destabilizes the romantic
dyad in the Sissi films mirrors the doomed relations between nations.
In the wake of the fatal union between Germany and Austria during
the period of Nazism, the Sissi films reflect the potentially destructive

236 Sissi’s World
nature of romanticized unions rather than restage an idealized fusion of

the former-Nazi nations.47
Count Andrassy’s impossible love for Sissi and her irrational love
for Hungary queer not only the binary national and romantic structure
of the films; these triangulations likewise point to a mode of tempo-
rality that destabilizes heterosexual notions of futurity. Queer tempo-
ralities would point to the nonlinear, a narrative that does not revolve
around the reproduction of the heterosexual family, to a “reproduc-
tive futurism,”48 or a heteronormative “time of inheritance,” as artic-
ulated by Judith Halberstam.49 A notion of queer temporalities often
links pasts (potentially repressed) with the present. In her introduction
to a special issue of GLQ on queer temporalities, Elizabeth Freeman
redefines performativity as a temporal term. Borrowing from Pierre
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, she argues that “cultural competence is
a matter of timing. … We achieve comfort, power, even physical leg-
ibility to the extent that we internalize the given cultural tempos and
time lines … for any number of encounters.”50 Hence, queer temporali-
ties would disrupt these time lines, engendering social failures through
asynchronicity. Queer time is too late or too early, prematurely cut off
or prematurely aged. Queer time would mark not the linear progres-
sion of the heteronormative family but rather “the pause, the dilated
melodramatic moment, the calendrical coincidence, the frozen gesture,
the scene of martyrdom, the criminal motive, the textures, tempos,
solidities, relativities of space/time.”51 While queer time shares some
of the qualities of the time of melodrama, it is far more concerned with
suspensions and pauses, the temporality of the death drive, than with
mourning the loss of the time of innocence. Linda Williams defines the
temporality of melodrama as the tragedy of “too late” for the innocent
victim.52 Seeking to reassert a moral legibility in a post-sacred world,
melodrama is aware of its own tragic temporality.53 Yet the temporal cri-
sis associated with queer texts is one that always anticipates the empty
47 Here, my reading differs from those of both Wauchope and Breger. Wauchope,
for example, writes: “the Sissi films present a popular, positive image of Austria
to the world,” in “Sissi Revisited,” 176. Breger argues that the Sissi films offer a
displaced apology for Nazism, in Szenarien kopfloser Herrschaf, 169.
48 Edelman, No Future, 9.
49 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
(New York: NYU Press, 2005), 5.
50 Elizabeth Freeman, “Introduction to Special Issue on Queer Temporalities,” Gay
and Lesbian Quarterly, 13 no. 2–3 (2007): 161.
51 Freeman, “Introduction,” 169.
52 Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle
Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 30.
53 See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976).
time of death. Rather than imagining innocence lost, queer time inter-
rupts the regeneration of innocence.
The Sissi films are filled with pauses and mistimings that threaten to
stop time altogether: the stretching of time in the lengthy processions
that constitute the finales of each film, the coincidences and meetings
that are too late, the thwarted kisses. The royal couple in particular is
vulnerable to many such mistimings. Although the narrative insists on
the eternal love between Franz and Sissi, the two are constantly sep-
arated and interrupted in their expression of love. And it is not only
Franz’s mother who instigates the separations between the lovers; Sissi
herself leaves her husband each time there is a misunderstanding. In
the beginning of The Fateful Years of an Empress, Sissi is in Hungary and
has clearly been there for some time. When her family members arrive
in Vienna at Schönbrunn to visit her, they are told: “If you want to see
the Empress of Austria, you will have to travel to Hungary.” Franz him-
self writes to Sissi requesting her return, and they meet by chance en
route to one another. Sissi then promises to return to Austria upon one
condition: “a plea: a little more time for me.” For Sissi the problem is a
temporal one. Yet it is not primarily Franz who has made it impossible
for the couple to be together; rather, Sissi’s constant travels keep the
couple apart. In the film, then, the problem is both temporal and spatial.
As Franz promises to spend more time with his wife and takes her to
Ischl, the original scene of their passion, they enjoy a utopian moment
together picking edelweiss. Yet it is precisely in the moment when Sissi
and Franz Joseph run towards one another in romantic bliss that it is
interrupted, as Sissi collapses in illness. The original romance in which
Sissi played the part of a commoner cannot be repeated; the lovers are
out of time, both too early and too late.
The interrupted kiss of the idyllic scene at Ischl is followed by news
from Sissi’s doctor that “every kiss from her is contagious,” a verdict
that ostensibly forces her to travel to ever more exotic locations in order
to avoid infecting her husband and daughter. For contemporary queer
audiences, the “contagion” of Sissi’s love evokes the contagion of AIDS
and the temporality that links love with a thwarted futurity.54 A binary
heterosexual matrix is consistently undermined in the Sissi films. The
heterosexual couple at the centre of the Sissi “fairytale” is unable to mas-
ter the linear temporality that would provide for its successful future.
Indeed, in the midst of travels and illness, Sissi expresses the revelation
that characterizes all queer texts, even those that are celebratory: “I feel
myself that something in me is not quite right.” The melancholy con-
tained in this statement, in the realization that one is different, that one
54 In this context, see Halberstam, who links queer temporalities with the death
drive that AIDS signifies, in In A Queer Time and Place, 2.
238 Sissi’s World
will never feel “at home,” is placed in the mouth of the most unlikely
of figures, the beloved Fräuleinwunder (miracle girl) Romy Schneider.
Yet Schneider/Sissi speaks here not only as a displaced Bavarian but
also as a post-Nazi German and Austrian heroine for whom Germans
and Austrians continue to feel a passionate attachment. She speaks, I
suggest, the emotions of loss and homelessness that have haunted Ger-
many and Austria since 1945.
On the face of it, the ending of the final film of the trilogy would
seem to undermine the queer reading I am laying out here, which relies
on a logic of cumulative displacements and triangulations. Here, the
nuclear family (Franz Joseph, Sissi, and their daughter Marie) is reu-
nited before the eyes of the Italian people and the church. The formal
and the intimate can be said to collapse, as the reconstitution of the
nuclear family coincides with the return to power of the monarchs. In
this scene, one could argue, the nation and the family meet and are
sanctioned by the church—a perfect moment of national identity. Yet
this scene is, ironically, the only one in The Fateful Years of an Empress in
which the family trio is depicted together. In all three films combined,
the nuclear family appears as a unit twice: once for a few seconds, after
the birth of Franz Joseph and Sissi’s daughter, and once in this conclud-
ing scene of the trilogy, before the eyes of the angry Italian subjects.
When Sissi and Franz Joseph attempt to visit their newborn baby in her
nursery in The Young Empress, they discover that she has been removed
by Franz Joseph’s mother. Once again, the nuclear family tableau is
interrupted and thwarted. In the final tableau of The Fateful Years of an
Empress, Sissi’s mother has brought Marie to Venice and Sissi exclaims,
with some surprise, “That is our child!” The artificiality of the moment
in the midst of the spectacle of the royal procession is highlighted by the
fact that the child has been effectively irrelevant throughout the final
film of the trilogy. This scene seems to reaffirm a heterosexual matrix for
power. As Edelman has argued, the child regulates political discourse,
standing in for a futurity that allies with a heterosexual logic: “The
sacralization of the Child thus necessitates the sacrifice of the queer.”55
Indeed, one might imagine that the child has returned just in time to
rescue the film from its queer triangulations and displacements. The
re-emergence of the child could, then, correspond to the end of Sissi’s
melancholy travels.
The child in the Venice tableau is, however, a daughter—a figure
who will not secure the future of the dynasty. What is more, the scene
itself is shot in a manner that complicates linearity and slows the move-
ment of time. As in the previous processional tableaux which constitute
the finales of all three films (sequences which last about a quarter of

the films’ length), this finale engages in a mode of editing that stretches
time. The long walk down the red carpet is dictated by the formalities of
the court, and is presented via a series of shots from a variety of angles
that slows the movement of the figures significantly. A medium shot of
the couple emerging from a boat and slowly traversing the red carpet
is followed by a long shot from a similar angle, giving the impression
that the characters are moving at a snail’s pace. The camera then cuts
to members of the Italian audience who are immobile, watching the
procession. The trumpeters have ceased playing, and the hostile public
is silent. Shots of the statue-like extras are intercut with another medi-
um-long shot of the monarchs from the front, enhancing the feeling that
time is slowing dramatically as they walk towards the camera. As Sissi
and Franz finally make it past the camera, they emerge from the right-
hand side of the screen, followed by more shots of the Italian spectators.
When the camera returns to the royal pair, once again following their
movements from behind, they have progressed almost not at all on the
red carpet. A medium shot of the couple and cuts to the spectators are
followed by a long shot of Sissi’s child, Marie, at the other end of the
red carpet. The child then begins to run, and the camera tracks along-
side her past two of the guards who line the carpet, suggesting that she
has traversed a reasonable amount of space. Yet when the camera pulls
back to shoot mother and daughter running towards one another, we
see that almost no space has been traversed at all, and the moment of
reunion is delayed ever more by the cuts between the running child,
and mother and child running towards one another.
This scene of ostensible familial harmony engages in a mode of tem-
poral stretching that destabilizes the narrative flow. It reveals a tempo-
rality that belies simple linearity, one that fetishizes a moment outside
of time, a slowing that threatens to fix time in allegory. The final tab-
leaux of the first two films in the trilogy are strikingly similar in form
and content. The final minutes of both films depict royal processions,
subject to the same mode of temporal stretching that characterizes the
procession in Venice in The Fateful Years of an Empress. In the first film,
when Sissi and Franz Joseph marry, both the procession to the church
and the walk down the aisle are edited in the same manner as the reun-
ion scene in Italy. The spectator repeatedly watches Sissi pass by in
the coach, moving from left to right of the screen, so that the arrival is
suspended indefinitely. The camera is positioned within the crowd, yet
the film spectator views the passing of the royal couple multiple times.
Similarly, the walk down the aisle is shot from a variety of angles, and
these shots are intercut in a manner as to slow the process of arrival
significantly. Once the coach has finally reached the cathedral, the
wedding procession of the couple is depicted. The first view of Franz
Joseph and Sissi in the cathedral is a long shot from the perspective of
240 Sissi’s World
the bishops and priests at the altar. Franz Joseph walks alone towards
the camera, and Sissi follows with her mother and Sophie, the Emper-
or’s mother. The Emperor passes four of the five guards lined up along
the red carpet, almost reaching the altar, when the scene cuts to a shot
of the bishops followed by a shot of Franz Joseph from behind. Here,
he is just beginning to pass the first of the five guards, revealing that
he has actually lost a great deal of ground, echoing Marie’s frustrated
run to her mother in the final film. For her part, Sissi also loses ground,
though Franz Joseph’s speed and subsequent regression are even more
dramatic. Similar shots are intercut throughout the wedding scene until
the wedding couple finally reaches the large group of officials crowding
the altar.
The final tableaux concluding all of the films include numerous
extras and an allegorical cast of characters comprising bishops, royal
family members, and important political and romantic figures. For
example, in the final tableau of the second film, Sissi and Franz Joseph
are crowned as monarchs of the Hungarian state, and this pageantry is
shot in a manner closely resembling the wedding scene of the first film.
Shots of church bells are intercut with scenes from the perspective of
the crowd as the royal coach passes by. The church plays a central role
symbolically in all three films, so that these scenes seem to hark back to
an older mode of staging and storytelling.56 In the second film, the final
tableau includes Sissi and Franz Joseph, their respective royal families,
the bishops, and Graf Andrassy himself, who stands in-between Sissi
and Franz Joseph as Sissi cries with joy. The bishop, the former rebel
Hungarian count, Franz Joseph, positioned as a relative outsider, and
Sissi stand together, offering an overcoded melange of symbolic mean-
ings. The crown itself seems to hover between Sissi and Andrassy, as if
levitating on its own, signifying a transferable royal power (Figure 9.5).
In the final moments of the film, the camera cuts to a closeup of Sis-
si’s face as tears gently roll down her cheeks. As the camera moves in,
Franz Joseph is cut out of the scene, so that Sissi and Andrassy fill the
frame alone. The final shot is a closeup of Sissi’s face, though the frame
continues to capture a portion of Andrassy’s coat, metonymically signi-
fying a destabilization of the royal dyad. In the final procession of the
first film, too, a triangulating figure is part of the scenario, for Nene is
prominently figured in the wedding tableau. Hence, all three final tab-
leaux constitute romantic and cultural displacements, both in spatial
and temporal terms.
56 Lang and Marksteiner point to the baroque Inszenierungsrausch (ecstasy of rep-

resentation) in these scenes, arguing, in contrast to my own reading, that the
endings offer a scene of religious harmony. Lang and Marksteiner, “Im Schatten
seiner Majestät,” 30.
Figure 9.5 The Young Empress: final tableau in Hungary.
The temporal stretching that is common to the final tableaux of all

of the films constitutes a break from linearity, reflecting a queer mode
of temporality and the structure of melancholy. Indeed, these tab-
leaux seem to delay “progress,” to threaten stagnation or regression.57
Edelman proposes that a queer mode of temporality would constitute
constant negation, the consistent indulgence of the death drive, dur-
ing which “The energies of vitalization ceaselessly turn against them-
selves.”58 The staged reunion between mother and daughter might seem
to elude such a reading, but when considered alongside the final tab-
leaux of the first two Sissi films, these tableaux reveal a discomfort with
heteronormative temporalities that signify the progress of history and
stable national identities. Indeed, through a formal mode of framing
and the slowing of time, the films cease at some point to link the past
and the present in a linear manner. Rather they present moments that
are out of time and place, atemporal and ahistorical. They resist both an
optimistic futurism and a regressive mode of nostalgia. Nostalgia is the
desire to return to the time and place of an idealized childhood, yet the
slowing of time in the Sissi films resists the harmonious representation
242 Sissi’s World
of a utopian past. The mode of affect here reflects a post-Nazi German

and Austrian melancholy: a displaced remorse due to the guilt associ-
ated with past crimes, a suspension of mourning through repression
of that which is lost. Indeed, guilt disallows the transition from melan-
cholia to mourning, so that the temporal stretchings of the processional
scenes can be seen as formal attempts to delay the arrival of the future.
The final tableaux of the Sissi films culminate in allegorical staging.
Indeed, the choreography of these scenes, positioning central figures
from the cast of characters together with symbolic political and reli-
gious figures, recalls the apotheosis endings of pre-Enlightenment
drama and of a “cinema of attractions,” as described by Tom Gunning.
Gunning argues that while narrative is dominant in classical cinema,
early cinema emphasizes “display” over storytelling. In particular,
early films, such as Georges Méliès’s La Voyage dans la Lune (1902), end
in apotheosis:
This ending, which entered cinema from the spectacle theater and
pantomime, provided a sort of grand finale in which principal
members of the cast reappear and strike poses in a timeless
allegorical space that sums up the action of the piece. The
apotheosis is also the occasion for scenic effects through elaborate
sets or stage machinery, as well as the positioning of the performers
(often in the form of a procession, or an architectural arrangement
of figures, with actual characters often supplemented by a large
number of extras precisely for their spectacular effect).59
These apotheosis endings, according to Gunning, produce a

“non-narrative form of closure. … they effectively halt the narrative
flow through an excess of spectacle, shifting spectator interest from
what will happen next to an enjoyment of the spectacle presented to
them.”60
The spectacular tableaux that constitute the endings of the Sissi films
offer a mode of reception based on non-narrative elements, in a man-
ner that resembles the apotheosis endings characteristic of baroque
drama and early cinema. While the Sissi films most certainly engage in
a mode of storytelling that we associate with classical cinema, the final
pageantry scenes in all three films offer overcoded tableaux that resist
modern interpretation. The narrative flow is broken by the slowness of
the pageantry and the spectacle of the overcrowded staging, and the
editing of the final processions slows time even further, dramatically
59 Tom Gunning, “‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’: The Temporality of the Cin-
ema of Attractions,” The Velvet Light Trap 32 (Fall 1993): 10.
60 Gunning, “‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t.’”
delaying arrival and closure. What is more, the allegorical tableaux

with which all films end offer images that are simultaneously too bur-
dened semantically and not sufficiently closed. As Alice Kuzniar tells
us, “allegorical narratives tell the truth about the failure to read” and
always offer, therefore, a queer mode of semiotics: “Through its privi-
leging of visibility, allegory pretends to open, direct statement, while
actually it calls attention to the breach between sign and referent.”61
Hence, for Kuzniar, as for Craig Owens, “allegory is always already
queer … through its oblique, disconcerting signification.”62 The allegor-
ical tableaux at the ends of the Sissi films offer a pause in the narrative
of modernity, a queer rupture in the fairytale of benevolent power.
And here we return, via allegory, to Sontag and camp, to the per-
formative that always reveals the lack, the irreconcilable relationship
between signifier and signified. I have argued that a queer mode of tem-
porality and representation structures the most popular West German
and Austrian films of the postwar period. Indeed, whereas camp and
its related mode of representation, allegory, might be associated with
a jouissance of representational excess, I would argue that they func-
tion in the Sissi films to reveal the melancholic affect of loss, of irrec-
oncilability that must eventually accompany all drag performances.
The royal processions in the Sissi films threaten to slow time almost to
the point of stopping, with their repetitive gestures and endless sus-
pension of arrival. Hence, what might be perceived as a queer mode
of melancholy, the melancholy of the abjected, is displaced yet again
in a post-Nazi context. Whereas queer melancholy is characterized in
large part by feelings of shame, the melancholy of the perpetrators of
the Holocaust is fueled not only by shame but also by guilt. Thus, the
temporal stretching that threatens to stop movement altogether in the
final tableaux of the Sissi films might be more closely allied to a desire
for timelessness, a resistance to both nostalgia and progress, than to a
longing for returns.
The fantasy of timelessness and placelessness is imagined most
concretely in The Fateful Years of an Empress. Sissi spends much of her
time in Hungary in the company of Count Andrassy, who invites her
to a party—what he calls a Mulatshak. A Mulatshak is, Sissi discovers,
the “signification of a space of time of a few hours. Every Hungarian
believes that he is in heaven and that all angels are gypsies.” Here, time
and place are queered, and all partygoers can take on the identity of
those who have been oppressed. Of course, the role of the gypsy indi-
cates freedom from convention, but for post-Holocaust German and
61 Alice Kuzniar, The Queer German Cinema (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2000), 8–9.
62 Kuzniar, The Queer German Cinema, 14.
244 Sissi’s World
Austrian audiences of the Sissi films, the gypsy signifies a group that
was targeted by the Nazis. Thus, the escape offered by the Mulatshak
and, by extension, by the films as a whole, complicates a regressive nos-
talgia for a time before guilt. Far from staging a triumphant return of the
Germano-Austrian Nazi power dyad, the Sissi films reflect a restless,
frustrated melancholy, a reprieve from the identification with the guilty
party. This restlessness is depicted in the opening shot of The Fateful
Years of an Empress: here, hundreds of birds spell out the letters for Sissi,
only to disperse and fly away as the credits begin. In the final scene of
the film, a flock of birds flies over the royal family in Venice, reminding
the viewers of the fragility of the order depicted in the opening shot. By
sidestepping a harmonious representation of the past, these films offer
their spectators a momentary slowing of time, a temporary reprieve
from the linearity of modern history. In this sense, the true pleasure
afforded by the films would be to render diverse German and Austrian
spectators “gypsy” for the “space of time of a few hours.” This mode
of spectatorship, then, would offer post-fascist German and Austrian
filmgoers a form of escape that is both straight and queer. As gypsies,
out of time and place, diverse spectators remain intimately attached to
the melancholy affect of homelessness and alienation that haunts the
Sissi films.
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Ten
Sisi: A Double Reflection on a
“Queer Icon”
Susanne Hochreiter
In this paper I discuss how we might understand Sisi as a queer icon.

Two approaches are central to my attempt to grasp this idea and to
understand the rhetorical and discursive processes that are at the foun-
dation of this phenomenon. 1) Parody is, I think, important for the
reception of Sisi; 2) Allegory, which I understand as a process of allego-
rization as Paul de Man explains it, is likewise a central tool for my anal-
ysis. Linked to concepts of visibility and invisibility, allegory provides
a lens through which we can view and analyze the queerness of Sisi.
Sisi, Sissi, Lissi, Elisabeth: Queer Parody

The Trash Musical “Sissi—Beuteljahre einer Kaiserin” (Sissi—The Bag
Years of an Empress) is an extravagant and funny drag performance
telling the story of Sisi. Performances integrate the audience intimately,
as members join in to sing pop songs together with the actors. It is a
quite obvious example of the parodic dimension of the Sisi discourse.
The parody works on every level: plot, characters, their relations, and
gender roles. And, of course, the ceremony of the Habsburg court
becomes an object of mocking humor. The musical was first put on in
2014, at the Tschauner theater in Vienna,1 famous for its Stegreiftheater
(spontaneous theater) shows. It was very successful and fascinated a
broad public. Deviating dramatically from romantic and tragic inter-
pretations of the Sisi myth as exemplified in, for instance, the globally
popular musical “Elisabeth” (1992),2 the trash musical is built on earthy
humor and unsentimental jokes. Above all, this show makes once again
1 For a description of the performance, see the review by Bernhard Baumgartner

in the Wiener Zeitung, July 10, 2014, Available at: http://www.wienerzeitung.
at/nachrichten/kultur/buehne/644201_Und-jetzt-alle.html. (accessed Novem-
ber 1, 2017).
2 “Elisabeth” had its world premiere in 1992 in Vienna’s Theater an der Wien.
248 Sissi’s World
very clear that Sisi is a “crowd pleaser”—everybody seems to love Sisi

stories.
Enthusiasm for Sisi is, of course, not solely a queer phenomenon,
but there is a particular queer interest in Sisi, and that is the topic of
this paper. Interestingly, Elisabeth was not a queer person in a narrower
understanding of the term, but there are specific motifs that make her a
queer figure: beauty and a violent death; her struggle with norms and
regulations at the Viennese court; and also her enthusiasm for fashion
and style. In order to discuss the ways that “Sisi” can be understood as
a queer icon, I will refer to the constructed figure (“Kunstfigur”) “Sisi,”3
the discourses surrounding her, and the various artistic realizations
of the subject “Sisi.” Elisabeth is a historic figure. She was married to
Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria and became Queen of Hungary when
the Habsburg Empire entered into a dual monarchy with Austria in
1867. I will use “Elisabeth” when I refer to the historic figure. “Sisi” is
the term I use when I refer to the complex discursive fabric that con-
notes this name.
Sisi is quite famous today. Sisi is also an important economic driver
of tourism in Austria. The Sisi myth sells. There is a great variety of Sisi
events, shows, movies, travel programs, exhibits, novels, biographies, fan
articles like dolls, jewelry, dishes, even sweets offered as products linked
to Sisi, and, of course, there are various Sisi Facebook groups and sites on
Pinterest.4 The spectrum of the “Sisi world” extends from the Sisi Museum
in Vienna, to the “Elisabeth” musical5 (which tells the “true story” of
Sisi) and includes the “Sisi Street,”6 a travel route that connects impor-
tant locations in Europe where Sisi lived or temporarily stayed. Indeed, a
research study shows that the Sissi films have often been the motivation
for choosing a travel destination: “Answering the question whether the
Sissi movies influenced the respondents’ trip to Vienna, 45.4% agreed that
the movie increased their desire to visit the film locations […].”7
3 Juliane Vogel uses the term “Kunstfigur” in her book Elisabeth von Österreich:
Momente aus dem Leben einer Kunstfigur, Mit einem kunstgeschichtlichen Exkurs von
Gabriela Christen (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1998).
4 The Pinterest address “Sisi (Elisabeth Empress of Austria), her world and her
legend” has more than 9400 “likes.” Available at: https://www.pinterest.at/
rlnwht/empress-elisabeth-of-austria-sissi/ (accessed November 2, 2017).
5 Das Musikal Elisabeth (website). http://www.elisabeth-das-musical.com/
6 Die Sisi-Straße—eine Kulturroute (website). http://www.sisi-strasse.info/de/
7 Mike Peters, Markus Schuckert, Kaye Chon, and Clarissa Schatzmann.
“Movie-Induced Tourism and the Case of the Sissi Movies,” 173. Available at:
h t t p s : / / w w w. r e s e a r c h g a t e . n e t / p r o f i l e / M a r k u s _
Schuckert/publication/264423428_Empire_and_Romance_
M o v i e - I n d u c e d _ To u r i s m _ a n d _ t h e _ C a s e _ o f _ t h e _ S i s s i _ M o v i e s /
links/554b6a0e0cf29f836c96b0db/Empire-and-Romance-Movie-Induced-
Tourism-and-the-Case-of-the-Sissi-Movies.pdf (accessed July 19, 2017).
Sisi: A Double Reflection on a “Queer Icon” 249
The films starring Romy Schneider seem to be the pivotal element

of the whole fascination with Sisi: the huge international success of the
films and their continuous presence on television emphasize this point.
The “Sissi” parodies mostly refer to the films, but there is also a strik-
ing mingling of Romy, Sissi, and Elisabeth images. All this supports the
argument that it is the film trilogy that is at the center of a process of
allegorization that I will explore in the second part of this essay.
Thus, we should not view the story of Sisi in a chronological order
from a “beginning” or an “original” historical narrative (Elisabeth)
onwards, but the other way around; or, even better, we could follow
the flickering images of Sisi that merge with one another. Sissi and Elis-
abeth and Sisi and Romy and Sissy … : we move “forward” and “back”
to resonances and layers of a past that is created in the present in a
manner that resembles the traces of writing in Sigmund Freud’s “Wun-
derblock.” In the “Wunderblock” the writing emerges “magically” due
to the different layers of paper, wax, and celluloid.8 The writing can be
easily deleted, but it will leave some traces. Maybe the writing is not
complete, or maybe it is not totally erased. Freud used the idea of the
“Wunderblock” to explain how our “apparatus of perception” and our
memory work. I understand it, too, as a metaphor for how we establish
narratives and experience time.
“She was always and everywhere,” says Andreas Brunner, histo-
rian9 and founder of QWIEN Centre for gay and lesbian culture and
history in Vienna, an expert on the queer interest in “Sisi.” He created
a special tour10 for queer visitors to the “Sisi Museum” located in the
Imperial apartments of the Hofburg on the occasion of Elisabeth’s 175th
birthday in 2012. Brunner is convinced that for most of the queer Sisi
admirers the historical facts are less important than certain (queer)
images. His own perception of the phenomenon is an omnipresence
of Sisi especially in Vienna. Sisi’s beauty and independence, her resist-
ance to norms, her interest in poetry, in philosophy, her enthusiasm for
sports and the beauty of women—all this the visitors of Brunner’s tour
liked about Sisi. The lack of a genuine interest in the “original” historic
figure is consistent with what I think connects to queer processes of
parody as well as to allegorization. Sisi is a particular actualization of
8 Sigmund Freud, “Notiz über den ‘Wunderblock,’” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14,
Werke aus den Jahren 1925–1931 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999).
9 Andreas Brunner is the author of Die Wittelsbacher: Könige und Kaiser aus Bayern
(Berlin: Parthas, 2011) and co-editor with Ines Rieder, Nadja Schefzig, Hannes
Sulzenbacher, and Niko Wahl of Geheimsache Leben: Schwule und Lesben im
Wien des 20. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Löcker, 2005), the catalog for the exhibition
“Geheimsache Leben in Neustifthalle” Vienna 2005/2006.
10 “Sisi: Kaiserin & Ikone der Schwulen und Lesben,” Qwien (website). http://
www.qwien.at/?p=1821 (accessed November 2, 2017).
250 Sissi’s World
specific modes of queer understanding, of reading procedures, of iden-

tification, and of disidentification.11
Brunner’s words “she was always and everywhere” certainly apply
to the presence of Romy Schneider’s Sissi and the periodic broadcasting
of the film trilogy on television in German-speaking countries. In his TV
review entitled “Die jährliche Kaiserin” (“The annual empress”) pub-
lished in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in December 24, 2010, the author Fritz
Göttler states that the films reveal many fissures in the seeming idyll of
the “Sissi and Franz” union. He observes a sad and dark sub-surface
which he considers characteristic of many German movies made in the
1950s.12 The enthusiastic reception of the films tells us that people con-
nected emotionally to the story of the unconventional young girl from
Bavaria who becomes the tragic Empress of Austria. More than six mil-
lion people saw each film in cinemas all over the world.13
As neither the biography of Elisabeth nor diverse artistic representa-
tions suggest that Elisabeth was queer in a narrow sense of the word,
I would like to clarify my understanding of the term with regard to
the phenomenon of Sisi as a queer icon. “Queer” is a complex term
that does not have a clearly defined meaning but that suggests flexible
thoughts and possibilities regarding concepts of gender and sexuality.
I consider “queer” as a signifier for the ongoing process of producing
and shifting normative and oppositional or subversive meanings. “That
is one of the things that queer” can refer to: “the open mesh of possibili-
ties, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of
meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s
sexuality, are not made (or cannot be made) to signify monolithically.”14
Queer to me is not a characteristic of somebody or something, even
though “queer” is often used in this sense, and it is often important to
people to refer to themselves as “queer.” In the context of literature and
of discourse analysis I understand “queer” as a mode of questioning
and crossing the heteronormative matrix.15 It is in this sense that I am
11 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Poli-
tics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
12 Fritz Göttler, “Die jährliche Kaiserin,” Süddeutsche Zeitung. Available at:
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/medien/tv-kritik-sissi-die-jaehrliche-kai-
serin-1.1039500 (accessed November 2, 2017).
13 Sissi: die Filme (film website). Available at: http://www.sissi.de/filme/presse_
sissi_weltweit.php (accessed November 2, 2017). See also Renate Seydel, Romy
Schneider: Bilder ihres Lebens (Berlin: Henschel, 1987), 53.
14 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 8.
15 Sabine Hark, “Heteronormativität Revisited: Komplexitäten und Grenzen einer
Kategorie,” in Queer Studies in Deutschland: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zur kritischen
Heteronormativitätsforschung, ed. Andreas Kraß (Berlin: Trafo, 2009). Available at:
https://www.zifg.tu-berlin.de/fileadmin/i44/DOKU/oeffentlich/Heteronorma-
tivitaet_Revisited_-_Komplexitaeten_und_Grenzen_einer_Kategorie_-_Sabine_
Hark.pdf (accessed November 2, 2017).
focusing on the claim that Sisi is a “queer icon.” My assumption is that

Sisi could be understood as a symbol for a mode of queering because
of an ongoing ironic, parodical process of citation by which seemingly
stable categories and norms become visible as shifting sign relations.
Many comedies, like the trash musical mentioned above or the ani-
mated film by Michael Bully Herbig Lissi und der wilde Kaiser (Lissi and
the Wild Emperor, 2007), a parody of the Sissi trilogy of the 1950s, as
well as some episodes of Herbig’s comedy show “Bullyparade,” such as
“Sissi—Change of Life of an Empress” (Bully Parade: Sissi—2012), con-
tribute to the parodical production of Sisi by occasionally reverting to
queer strategies like drag, cross-gender acting, and parody of the dom-
inant (gender) order. Besides a tendency to make flat jokes, these pro-
ductions play with ironic citations: gender, desire, status, plot, and any
kind of “sense” turn volatile, “illogical,” gain different meanings, or
deviate from conventional understanding. The very notion of “being”
someone or something is queered, at times, so that identities become
ambiguous16 and difficult to categorize.
Comedy still enjoys ill repute in some intellectual circles. Unlike
in the USA, where queer comedians like Wanda Sykes, Ellen DeGe-
neres, and Margaret Cho have become enormously successful, there
is no well-established tradition of queer humor in German-speaking
countries. Comedy is often not considered serious but is rather seen as
flippant and superficial, an immunization against real political issues.
Queer people are, of course, very sensitive to homophobic stereotypes
that have a fixed place in German-speaking comedy. Michael Herbig,
German director, actor, and producer, has often been criticized for the
stereotypical depiction of gay men in his movies.17 I think these films
need to be examined more carefully, as some clichés Herbig reproduces
might, in fact, be subversively charged.
Still, humor counts—I consider it crucial to queer practice. Sissi (1955),
the first film in Ernst Marischka’s trilogy, is a romantic comedy. All the
supporting characters play comic roles: for example, the befuddled
Colonel Böckl and Sissi’s father-in-law who only speaks to say “Well
done” (“Na, bravo”). The constantly irritated, highly strung mother-in-
law with her inimitable nervous timbre acts more like a governess than
16 Antke Engel, Wider die Eindeutigkeit: Sexualität und Geschlecht im Fokus queerer
Politik der Repräsentation (Frankfurt: Campus, 2002).
17 The owner of a gay bar in Berlin complains about the stereotypically “faggy”
images Herbig uses, whereas most gay men would behave “normally.” “Not
every gay guy needs a feather boa.” See Markus Zehentbauer, “Nicht jeder
Schwule braucht eine Federboa,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 17, 2010 (interview
with Axel Hartmann), Available at: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/
interview-zu-traumschiff-surprise-nicht-jeder-schwule-braucht-eine-feder-
boa-1.747939 (accessed November 2, 2017).
252 Sissi’s World
the emperor’s mother. Many scenes can be understood as a parody of

aristocracy and the imperial court or as parody of marriage itself.
In what we might now call queer “readings” of Sisi or queer “prac-
tices” that refer to Sisi—the myth, the icon—the question that still
remains unanswered is: why Sisi? What makes Sisi a queer icon? There
were many fashionable queens, many beautiful women, many unhappy
wives, and certainly some divas even more extravagant than Elisabeth
amongst Europe’s aristocrats. Who is it that finds Sisi so interesting, and
why?
A queering of “Sisi” has its starting point in the achronality of the
narratives and the juxtapositional ways in which different images refer
to each other. Indeed, the idea of an origin or beginning is questioned
here. Queer Studies has recently engaged intensively with questions of
time, of past, and of memory. Laura Doan, for example, highlights the
“paramount importance in forging any number of pathways in creating
queer narratives of pastness, including the unmaking of history.”18 The
idea of a queer temporality, according to Elizabeth Freeman, could be
“a set of possibilities produced out of temporal and historical differ-
ence,” and we can understand “the manipulation of time as a way to
produce both bodies and relationalities.” Reflecting on performativity
in temporal terms, she conceptualizes “temporal regimes embedded in
sexuality as a field of knowledge.”19 Supposedly natural attributes of
masculinity and femininity “are the results of repetitions sedimenting
over time”;20 hence, delay and surprise, untimeliness, off-beat timing,
deviations, irritations, and changes of temporal orders of lives are ele-
ments of queer temporality.
The narrative structure of historiographic writing very often sup-
ports a “straight” concept of history reproducing dominant paradigms
of heteronormative family and kinship. In this sense, Carolyn Dinshaw
emphasizes the necessity of reworking linear temporality.21 A queer
reading of any narrative is a way to achieve a “rewiring of the senses”
(Jacqui Alexander) “in order to apprehend an expanded range of tem-
poral experiences that are not regulated” by normative structures,
spaces, or logics.22 Artistic representations and narrative texts have the
potential to refuse a notion of history as an origin narrative precisely
18 Laura Doan, “Queer History/Queer Memory: The Case of Alan Turing,” GLQ:
A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 23, no. 1 (2017): 113–136, abstract.
19 Elizabeth Freeman, “Introduction” to ‘Queer Temporalities’ Issue, GLQ: A Jour-
nal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, no. 2–3 (2007): 159ff.
21 Carolyne Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Eliza-
beth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon, and
Nguyen Tan Hoang, “Theorizing Queer Temporalities,” GLQ A Journal of Lesbian
and Gay Studies 13, no. 2–3 (2007): 185.
22 Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities,” 185.
because narrative elements such as anachronism and achronism reverse

the experience of time.23 Elizabeth Freeman puts it this way:
[W]riterly strategies are ways to throw something out into a

formless future, disseminating the self in the hopes that someone,
someday, might reassemble the pieces in ways that in turn
reconfigure his or her own present, or rearrange our sense of the
past. […] [Writing] is a toss of the dice not only into the future but
also for the future.24
Whereas conventional biographies tend to reproduce dominant pat-

terns of chronology and time, the Sissi films, but also the parodist musi-
cal and TV show, undermine the idea of straight chronicity.
Sisi-Sissi: Parody, Camp, and Queer Performance

In her article “Melancholy Empress: Queering Empire in Ernst Mar-
schika’s Sissi Films,” Heidi Schlipphacke demonstrates how the films
offer “queer representations of time and space.”25 She argues that the
films consistently deny the “reproductive futurity”26 of heteronorma-
tive temporalities. Sissi’s travels, her flights from the family, and the
superficial interest in her children express rejections of normalized fam-
ily structures. The films, too, reflect “deep-seated anxieties about home
and historical continuity that haunt post-Nazi Germany and Austria.”27
In her compelling thesis, Schlipphacke brings together diverse and
sometimes contradictory aspects of the complex interrelations of mov-
ies, narratives, and political as well as social dimensions. The moods of
melancholy and loss that characterize the films are a starting point for
her queer reading of the movies. Her analysis of the complex interplay
of nature and artifice and the hybrid nature of the films, as well as the
multiple modes of access that the films offer to spectators is evidence of
the film’s queer structure. Schlipphacke also highlights the “camp qual-
ities of performativity and artificiality” that are characteristic of all three
films.28 In agreeing with the observation that “hyperperformance and
excess are only part of the picture” I would suggest that the parodical
23 Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, eds., Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissen-

schaft: Theoretische Grundlegung und Anwendungsperspektiven (Berlin: De Gruyter,
2005).
25 Heidi Schlipphacke, “Melancholy Empress: Queering Empire in Ernst
Marischka’s Sissi Films,” Screen 51, no. 3 (2010): 232–255.
26 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke
27 Schlipphacke, “Melancholy Empress,” 233.
254 Sissi’s World
dimension of these performances might be productive for the discus-

sion of what makes Sisi a queer icon in the context of these films.
As Schlipphacke points out camp “always emphasizes a gap between
signifier and signified.” Parody works in a similar way and often
includes qualities of mockery and derision, sometimes with a satirical
impulse. Camp, as described by Susan Sontag, is in its essence charac-
terized by “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”29 In
her 1964 essay on Camp, Sontag also establishes a connection between
Camp taste and “homosexuals.” The argument is still contested, but, in
fact, “camp” plays a role in queer theory.30 Moe Meyer describes Camp
as a “queer parody.” Parody thus seems to be the general term, whereas
Camp refers specifically to a parody of heteronormativity in a given
cultural context (in this case, gay men in North America) and aspects of
style. Parody, in the way I use the term, signifies a text or performance
of the second order. It is always related to a specific text, a performance
or practice and performs a difference aiming for a comic effect. Camp
does not necessarily focus on comic effects; parody does. Camp appre-
ciates the ridiculous whereas parody exhibits the ridiculous.31
Judith Butler identifies parody, especially in drag shows, as an exam-
ple of enactment that exposes gender as something that is generated
performatively: “Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no
original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of
the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.”32 The
Sissi films offer a specific form of gender performance that is related to
the “Herrschaftsperformance” (performance of monarchical power)—
in a parodic manner. In the protagonist Sissi we see a princess acting as
a bourgeois girl acting as an empress acting as a bourgeois girl acting as
princess acting as Romy Schneider … These deferrals create the effect
of parody: “[…] performance is simply second nature for Sissi.”33 The
performance of performance is, hence, more about the status of the role
performed than about the status of the self. It shows a struggle with
identity markers with which queer spectators certainly can relate. This
struggle includes the questioning of gender roles, of love, of marriage,
of “home,” even of life.
29 Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays

[1966], Susan Sontag (New York: Picador 2001), 275–292.
30 Many theorists refer to the concept of camp. See, for example, Moe Meyer, ed.,
The Politics and Poetics of Camp (London: Routledge, 1994).
31 Seraina Plotke and Stefan Seeber, eds. Parodie und Verkehrung: Formen und Funk-
tionen spielerischer Verfremdung und spöttischer Verzerrung in Texten des Mittelalters
und der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2016), 17.
32 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian
Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge 1991), 13–31.
The hope for a “normal” home and the longing to just be oneself that
Sissi repeatedly expresses is something very familiar to a queer audi-
ence. It is a longing for recognition. Recognition is an important topic
of the films. On the one hand, the relationship between Sissi and her
mother-in-law is shaped by Sissi’s demand for recognition and Sophie’s
refusal. On the other hand, there are scenes that are about recognition
and appreciation. When Sissi’s brother marries a bourgeois woman and
finally introduces her and their child to his mother, he receives recog-
nition. Similarly, Count Andrassy seems to be the one who recognizes
Sissi’s inner self, her warm “heart,” and her affection for Hungary.
But whom does he “recognize” in this complex interplay of roles? The
character of the film, the empress, the woman (as woman), the actress?
Recognition comes with cognition.
The multiple roles and the complex layers of cognition and recog-
nition in Marischka’s films are grounded in the double structure of
representation as viewed in the figure of the monarch and in filmic
representation. Sissi and Franz act like an empress and emperor—this
is a structure owed to the logic of the “king’s two bodies.”34 The impe-
rial person is like the diva, the modern celebrity or the religious icon,
always double: there is an oscillation between real person and fictitious
character.35 Therefore, the Sissi films offer a double double: Romy, Sissi,
Elisabeth. As Sisi grew into a tragic figure (“mater dolorosa”), so, too,
did Romy Schneider. Her biography shows parallels to her imperial
counterpart. Like Elisabeth Romy Schneider was famous for her beauty.
She, too, experienced a difficult marriage and bemoaned the death of
her son. She also felt harassed by the public and the press. Whereas
Elisabeth managed to control her appearances in public quite well, it
was much more difficult for Romy Schneider to escape from the omni-
present paparazzi. The famous actress and Elisabeth both shared the
urge to find a home, the need for privacy—it was their failing. This
is the material for a “most poetic” story. As both died unexpectedly,
their narratives intertwine even more, which intensifies all aspects of
modern mythology. Elisabeth and Romy: both are the maimed individ-
uals. It is the typical celebrity story that offers the public a collective
sentiment of loss and failure characteristic of our modern culture.36 The
dead body of a celebrity is a strong mythical image, linked to narratives
which serve as models for us. The dead beautiful and tragic woman is
the most powerful figure of salvation and identification.37
34 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theol-
ogy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).
35 Elisabeth Bronfen and Barbara Straumann, Die Diva. Eine Geschichte der Bewun-
derung. (Munich: Schirmer und Mosel, 2002), 47.
36 Bronfen and Straumann, Die Diva, 46.
37 See Roland Barthes, Mythen des Alltags (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010).
256 Sissi’s World
The cult star speaks to all of us because he or she is perceived as noth-

ing other than a signifier, referring to other signifiers, a textual—and
usually today above all a visual—commodity whose two-dimensionality
covers over the complexities and unsolvable contradictions inhabiting
real lives.38 Sisi is a super icon because of the concentration of two double
(or multiple) symbolic bodies and the narrative of the tragic fate of long-
ing to be recognized for who she really is. The quest for recognition as an
individual is central to queer struggles for acceptance in society. Both bio-
graphical and fictionalized narratives of Sisi are characterized by parod-
ical strategies of gender performance and a mode of “disidentification.”
Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded

meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and
reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion
that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and
exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account
for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications.39
Thus, disidentification is a step toward cracking open the code of the

majority; it proceeds by using this code as raw material for represent-
ing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered
unthinkable by the dominant culture.40 As José Esteban Muñoz explains
in the context of performances by queers of color, parody contains
within it the potential for disidentification. In the context of the Sisi
discourse queer parody very often works as disidentificatory practice,
as the example in the next section will show.
“Sissi!” “Franz!”
A significant element of the Sisi discourse is a specific phrase of the
Sissi films that “travels” through different artistic productions but also
serves as a quote many people recognize and use in different contexts—
mostly in a parodical manner. The inherent quality of transformation is,
I think, important for the understanding of the queer dimension of Sisi.
In Gérard Genette’s Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree41 par-
ody and travesty are the two hypertextual procedures of transforma-
tion (other than pastiche and persiflage as procedures of mimicry/
imitation). Parody is a semantic transformation of a performance or
text, whereas travesty is its counterpart: it transforms a style in which
a common topic is represented. Transformation means the deformation
38 Elisabeth Bronfen, “Fault Lines: Catastrophe and Celebrity Culture,” European

Studies 16 (2001): 119.
39 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 31.
40 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 31.
41 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa New-
man and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
of the “hypotext” (“Text A”) to which the hypertext (“Text B”) refers.
Hypertexts are texts of the second degree. In an ongoing process of
transformative relations between texts, it becomes increasingly difficult
to tell to what degree one text interacts with another. A complex system
of reference of interrelations and intertextualities created by ongoing
procedures of parody dissolves the question of what or who was first
into a potentially infinite mesh.
Parody contains citations of “hypotexts” or elements that sometimes
appear as tropes. Quotes become meta-quotes without any authority
or authorship but assign repeatability (“Wiederholbarkeit”) and repeat-
edness (“Wiederholtheit”) to citations themselves,42 as Bettine Menke
argues in her article in which she analyzes the metaleptic process of
citation. Even though there is a temporal structure of a before and
an after, reverse crossings are possible so that a linear order of time
becomes blurred. Sisi, understood in this way, is a continuous practice
of quotations that do not stick to the temporal order of an “original”
narrative (Elisabeth and her biography) and the films and musicals that
come “after.” In fact, the whole Sisi complex consists of repeated and
repeatable citations. This is what makes Sisi a timeless and perpetual
phenomenon: “[…] what distinguishes our celebrity culture from ear-
lier notions of fame is that today we seem to have created and indeed
are celebrating a fame almost entirely cut off from history.”43
An example for such a process is the mutual invocation “Sis-
si!”—“Franz!” which occurs repeatedly between the two protagonists
in Marischka’s Sissi films. This phrase has entered social memory44
and is part of a parody by which gender norms and normative desire
can be transgressed, a process that contains within it the potential for
disidentification from the perspective of a minority subject.45 When-
ever somebody calls out “Sissi!,” the answer is “Franz!”—independ-
ent of the gender or relation of the persons performing this double
entreaty.
In the films, the emphatic exclamations “Sissi!”—“Franz!” indicate
highly emotional situations, such as when the two see each other after
being separated or in a moment of danger or despair. The exclamation
is an invocation. It is a calling out for each other that has a light sound
42 Bettine Menke, “Zitierfähigkeit: Zitieren als Exzitation,” in Zitier-Fähig: Findun-

gen und Erfindungen des Anderen, ed. Andrea Gutenberg and Ralph Poole (Berlin:
Erich Schmidt, 2001): 167.
43 Bronfen, “Fault Lines,” 119.
44 See Jan Weyand and Gerd Sebald, “Soziales Gedächtnis in differenzi-
erten Gesellschaften: Relevanzstrukturen, mediale Konfigurationen und
Authentizität in ihrer Bedeutung für soziale Gedächtnisse im generationellen
Vergleich.” Available at: http://www.soziologie.phil.uni-erlangen.de/system/
files/soziale_erinnerung-antrag-gekuerzt_0.pdf (accessed November 2, 2017).
45 See Muñoz, Disidentifications, 25.
258 Sissi’s World
of astonishment, as if there were an unknown question: who are you?

Who am I?
Judith Butler refers to Louis Althusser’s concept of “interpellation,”
a process in which a person is constituted as a subject. The recognition
of the subject includes submission to the law. Similarly, the gender-
ing of a person functions as such an interpellation, for example: “It’s
a girl.” In Butler’s theory, the performativum entails a failure because
of its iterability. “Sissi!” and “Franz!” are such interpellations because
their repeatability and repeatedness reveal the failure of the (gender)
interpellation but also the potential for resistance and subversion (of
gender):46
Where the uniformity of the subject is expected, where the

behavioral conformity of the subject is commanded, there might
be produced the refusal of the law in the form of parodic inhabiting
of conformity that subtly calls into question the legitimacy of the
command, a repetition of the law into hyperbole, and of the law
against the authority of the one who delivers it.47
In one episode of Michael Herbig’s TV parodies of the Sissi films, we

see Herbig as “Sissi” and Christian Tramitz as “Franz.”48 They enter the
scene from the right, walking side by side, holding hands in a court-like
manner, accompanied by the musical motif known from the films—a
signature tune. They start their conversation as follows:
Sissi!: Franz! What is this?

Franz!: Your name!
Sissi!: No. I mean this colorful bar that dares to block the emperor’s
and the empress’ way. […]49
The bar in the next shot becomes a border barrier that is erected by
an officer, who stops Sissi and Franz and proclaims the establishment
of the German Democratic Republic. Asked what he is doing on “our
property Austria,” he replies that he had bought it because he was
bored. Sissi answers: “Very well then. We will walk around it.” In the
following scene, the property is shown from a distance: it is a tiny piece
46 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York:
Routledge, 1993). See also Lars Distelhorst, Judith Butler (Paderborn: Wilhelm
Fink, 2009), 50–51.
47 Butler, Bodies that Matter, 122.
48 Michael Herbig, Sissi—Wechseljahre einer Kaiserin. Episode “Grenze” (Border).
Available at: https://youtu.be/5kStU8stdIw (accessed November 2, 2017).
49 Herbig, Sissi, 0:16/1:07.
of meadow framed by the border barrier. Here is a stinging satire of

national borders, nations, and history: “Austria” is a tiny speck that
neither the empress nor the emperor recognize at first (“red white red—
that reminds me of something”), and the officer’s allegation that he is
the new owner does not irritate them at all. They walk around the bor-
ders which, of course, are not borders, as there are no countries, and
no imperial couple actually exists. The generalized alpine scenery, the
dress and hairstyle, “Sissi”—“Franz”—all are citations.
In parody comic incongruity may offer a juxtaposition of the original
text with its new form or context by means of contrasting the serious
with the absurd.50 The humor comes when expected narrative patterns
or behavioral scripts are denied or remain unfulfilled. The method of
the parody is “to ‘de-realise’ the norms that the original tries to ‘realise’,
thus reducing the normative status of the original to a convention of
mere artifice.”51 The comic characters enact parodies of femininity (Her-
big in drag) but also of masculinity, as “Franz,” too, is a highly artificial
character. Herbig’s short film adds grotesque elements and intensifies
in this way the parody which is already part of the Sissi films.
According to Wolfgang Kayser the grotesque is a structure. The
essence of the grotesque is the alienated world. What was familiar and
well known becomes strange and uncanny. The grotesque in Kayser’s
view is our world that has changed. Suddenness and surprise are ele-
ments of the grotesque as well as the collapse of established categories
of our world.52 The grotesque is a play with the absurd, one that can
produce a comic or frightening effect—this is what we find in Herbig’s
Sissi scenes, in which categories indeed collapse. The grotesque can be
understood as an element of queer parody and is insofar an element of
the Sisi discourse.
In this first part of my essay I looked at the parodic effects of cita-
tions that are essential for the Sisi discourse and for its queerness. In the
second part, I will approach the Sisi complex by changing the perspec-
tive. Beginning with Elisabeth’s biography, I will then discuss effects
of allegorization that I think are crucial for a second queer dimension
inscribed into the Sisi discourse that is related to parody. The process of
allegorization makes the parody work. It makes Sisi iconic and, hence,
a recognizable and quotable “Sisi.”
50 Margret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-modern (Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 1993) cit. in Doris Leibetseder, Queer Tracks: Sub-
versive Strategies in Rock and Pop Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 35.
51 Leibetseder, Queer Tracks, 38.
52 Wolfgang Kayser, Das Groteske: Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung (Olden-
burg: Gerhard Stalling Verlag, 1957; Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 2004) (citations are
of the 2004 edition), 198ff.
260 Sissi’s World
Sisi-Elisabeth. Or the Imperial Allegory of Queer

Elisabeth, Empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, died on Septem-
ber 10, 1898, killed by Luigi Lucheni in Geneva. Because of its sudden-
ness, her death shocked many people—even though the Empress had
already been absent for a very long time. Constant conflicts with the
Viennese court, with her mother-in-law Archduchess Sophie, a continu-
ous struggle with her own roles as mother, wife, and empress led her to
travel across the world in an attempt to escape. For years she traveled,
and during this time she hardly ever fulfilled her duties as “Landesmut-
ter” (mother of the nation/country). Instead, people saw paintings and
photographs of her or read awkward stories about her luxurious life.
The Empress was always beautiful, distant, and untouchable. No mem-
bers of the highest families (except for some relatives and friends like
Carmen Silva) nor ordinary people approved of her behavior. Censor-
ship allowed for the suppression of critical voices, but rare newspaper
articles and documents show subtle criticism of Elisabeth.53 The media
outright ignored her in the last years.54 Except for some family members
and a small circle at the imperial court, nobody knew where she was
or what she was doing toward the end of her life. Her withdrawal had
become so complete that the most recent picture of her was taken in
1870,55 decades before her death.
It was her violent and unexpected death that changed this image
completely. What was strange and distant about Elisabeth before now
seemed intimate and familiar. The woman who for centuries had been
seen as a foreigner unwilling to assimilate now became a popular figure.
Evelyn Knappitsch uses the term “spontaneous popularity”56 for the
surprising shift in public opinion. In fact, the whole story of Elisabeth
now lent itself to being written. Media coverage aimed for a national
unity beyond all differences, a tendency that had already gained strong
centrifugal power in the Habsburg empire. Viennese newspapers tried
to strengthen a national spirit, a group consciousness, in the face of the
experience of radical disruption. The trauma caused by the assassina-
tion was the site of re-collectivization, aiming to overcome the multi-
tude of ethnic, religious, and political differences.57
53 Evelyne Knappitsch, Die Kaiserin, ihr Mörder und das Attentat von Genf. Presse-
mediale (Nach-)Blicke auf die Kaiserin: Zur Konstruktion von “Sisi”-Bildern in der
Wiener Presse um 1900 (Graz: Universitätsverlag, 2012), 24.
54 Elisabeth’s fiftieth birthday in 1887 was mentioned in Die Neue Freie Presse in just
seven lines. On her sixtieth birthday, people learned only that she had spent it in
Paris. Knappitsch, (Nach-)Blicke auf die Kaiserin, 36.
55 Vogel, Elisabeth von Österreich, 141.
56 Knappitsch, (Nach-)Blicke auf die Kaiserin, 36.
“We are one people and one family. Indeed, in this widespread and
ethnically-rich monarchy, hardly a heart beats now that is not in accord,
in grief and compassion, with the so terribly stricken monarch. It is a
mourning choir of a million voices that we are hearing.”58
People bemoaned the loss of something they had never had and that
never was. There had been no empress who cared about their fate; there
had been no liberal spirit that lightened the burdens of the oppression
people suffered; there had been no ideal mother and wife. Still, for a
moment, there seemed to re-emerge a lost sentiment of national com-
munity. The loss of the empress was almost the loss of the empire itself.
The function of an empress, besides her reproductive duties, is the
virtual allegorical representation of the dynasty’s hegemonic power.
This might be the reason for the empathic and emphatic obituaries—
as if death would reinstall paradoxically the integrity of the empress
as empress. The allegorical function of the empress (representing the
empire) and the process of allegorization are central to the understand-
ing of the ongoing (pop) cultural production—Sisi: movies, musicals,
plays, novels—all “respond” in specific ways to the allegorical struc-
ture inherent in “the empress.”
A closer look at the media reports after Elisabeth’s death reveals
that even though papers shared an overall positive portrayal of the
empress, the interpretation of who she was differs significantly. Here
we can already see the struggle of interpretation. Who was Elisabeth?
And what had actually happened? In September 1898, only one biog-
raphy59 was available in stores. The image of the dead empress being
created reflected the politically shaped perceptions of Elisabeth. For
liberal papers like Neue Freie Presse, she represented the ideal “bour-
geois woman”; the social democratic Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers Paper)
emphasized Elisabeth’s outstanding individuality and her critical atti-
tude towards aristocracy; and the official channels of the imperial fam-
ily, of course, described her as an ideal empress, a loving supporter of
her husband.60 Most media outlets praised Elisabeth’s grace and out-
standing beauty: this is where all images interlock. Whatever the ide-
ological character might have been, it is an unquestioned beauty, and
its cool glow casts the “aura” of a figure coming to life in the wake of
her death.
All media outlets commented on Elisabeth’s sufferings; symptoms
of hysteria were discussed, as well as the pain and mourning of her
son’s death. Papers stylized her as a “mater dolorosa” who bore a cruel
58 Neues Wiener Tagblatt, September 11, 1898:1, cited by Knappitsch, (Nach-)Blicke

auf die Kaiserin, 25 (translated by Ida Cerne).
59 Eugen Baron D’Albon, ed., Unsere Kaiserin (Vienna: Georg Szelinski k. u. k. Uni-
versitätsbuchhandlung, 1890).
60 Knappitsch, (Nach-)Blicke auf die Kaiserin, 35–37.
262 Sissi’s World
fate. In a feature in the Neue Freie Presse, she was the ideal of a woman:
as a wife, as a mother, as a queen, as a beauty and, in particular, as an
endurer, as a mater dolorosa. The enduring female is a being that comes
closest to godliness.61
Whenever we speak of the historical figure Elisabeth we inevitably
talk about discourses and narratives created in light of her death. The
icon “Sisi” is born out of the dead body of the woman, “Elisabeth.”
Elisabeth Bronfen analyzes the conjunction of death, art, and feminin-
ity in Western culture in her book Over Her Dead Body. In the second
part of the book Bronfen reflects upon the movement “from animate
body to inanimate text.”62 Beauty in this conception is an image of
death and connected with pleasure at the sight of death. Death is
veiled and unveiled by the beauty of the woman. Edgar Allan Poe’s
sentence “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most
poetical topic in the world,”63 mirrors the specifically gendered logic
of western cultural mythology. As an element of western gender con-
struction the death of a beautiful woman is not only an aesthetic motif
but a narratological necessity. The last act of most classical tragedies
ends with the death of the protagonist. The hero’s or heroine’s death,
in the end, is in fact a fulfillment of the drama itself in a poetic and
moral sense.
In September 1898, a new discourse is ignited about Elisabeth, in
which the desire to discover the “true” Elisabeth is a leitmotif, and aes-
theticization is very important. Death in drama, as well as in the royal
vita, virtually restores order. Elisabeth’s resistance to norms was very
strong, consistent, and provocative. She overstepped limits of all kinds:
gender norms first of all, but also norms concerning her social rank, her
duties as empress and as mother. Her enthusiasm for sports and strict
diets helped her construct a very slim and athletic body—certainly not
the beauty ideal of her time. Indeed, her resistance to behavioral norms,
to court rules, and to the narrow-mindedness of her environment and
the aristocracy in general was observed. Suffering due to the compul-
sion to make public appearances, she soon refused to accompany the
emperor to events like balls and receptions, openings, or inaugura-
tions. Biographers agree: she did not suit Viennese court society, and
61 Martin Kugler, “‘Sisi’ als ideale Frau und Österreichs guter Engel,” Neue Freie
Presse, September 18, 1898. Available at: http://diepresse.com/home/leben/
mensch/733345/Sisi-als-ideale-Frau-und-Oesterreichs-guter-Engel (accessed
November 2, 2017).
62 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and The Aesthetic (New
York: Routledge 1992), 57.
63 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Graham’s Magazine 28, no.
4 (April 1846): 163–167. Available at: http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/
philcomp.htm (accessed November 2, 2017).
after a certain point in her life, she did not want to fit in any more. Bri-
gitte Hamann begins her book about Elisabeth by stating, “The subject
of this biography is a woman who refused to behave according to her
social rank.”64 According to Hamann, Elisabeth had already achieved
what representatives of the women’s movement demanded years later.
Just a few weeks after her assassination biographies about Elis-
abeth flooded the book market. Because of Elisabeth’s death, we can
finally read her life; it eventually becomes intelligible. The allegory of
the empress, as Paul de Man suggests, remains one of an elusive and
unreadable figure. An allegory must implicate a mystery, an enigma.
This is where the question of what makes Sisi a queer icon arises. In the
case of Sisi, the readability is strongly connected to the dimension of
the visual, as an empress or a queen is herself at arms-length from legi-
bility. The dialectic of making visible and making invisible is important
for my understanding of the allegorical process and how it connects to
queer Sisi.
In-Visibility, Secrets, Queer

Talking about Sisi means, first of all, talking about pictures. Visual
presentation is crucial for an icon. The best-known picture of Sisi is a
portrait by Franz Xaver Winterhalter.65 It is the famous painting with
the white edelweiss stars that shows the young empress Elisabeth in
a white dress in a classic landscape with antique columns on the right
side. Even here, Elisabeth does not really stand still; she seems to be
walking from the right side to the left side of the picture—out of a
shadow into a shadow, and just for a moment, she stops and looks over
her left shoulder to glance at the viewer.66
The function of the imperial portrait is to demonstrate power. In the
rare cases of female queens and empresses who ruled their country, we
see the same insignia in the official portraits that are used by their male
counterparts: crown, scepter, and the imperial orb. Empress Catharine
of Russia and Queen Victoria are well-known examples. A large-format
portrait of Queen Victoria was also painted by Winterhalter. It shows
the Queen on her throne with the crown and an ermine coat. Susanne
von Falkenhausen analyzes the portrait of the Queen as a rare exam-
ple of the formal representation of female power: “[…] in the figure of
64 Brigitte Hamann, Elisabeth. Kaiserin wider Willen (Munich: Piper, 2016), 9 (trans-
lated by Ida Cerne).
65 Winterhalter also created the two “intimate” portraits that were produced for
the private rooms and were not viewed in public.
66 Gabriela Christen, “Die Bildnisse der Kaiserin Elisabeth,” in Elisabeth von Öster-
reich, ed. Vogel, 169.
264 Sissi’s World
Queen Victoria the image strategy of the national allegory, which as a

rule is feminine, transcends the body of the king.”67
In her work about gendered visual politics in the context of the
French republic in the eighteenth century, Falkenhausen explains that
the representation of a nation needs a “visually symbolic body.” This
symbolic body has to be blank and different from the masculine body,
because a specific male body would mean risking a representation of
the collective. But who or what can be the signifier of a transcendental
generalization like “freedom” or “nation”? The seemingly paradoxical
answer is that the female body as an allegorical body comes to represent
the masculine generalization.68 While women became more excluded
from public life during the French Revolution, they grew more “visible”
in and as allegoric memorials.69 The body of the empress, of course,
serves as the visual symbolic body for the empire, signifying its integ-
rity, its strength, and its power. The beauty of the empress is the beauty
of the nation.
Elisabeth’s mounting resistance to her public duties can be read as
an insistence on her existence as a human being, as a subject in a time
when women were not supposed to be subjects.70 Elisabeth quite clearly
realized that her body was claimed as an imperial symbol, and therefore
the different acts of bodily control can be seen as acts of self-affirmation
in a radical sense. Competitive sports and strict diets are the two ways
Elisabeth chose to put this into effect. The conflict between the visible
symbolic body and the invisible body of the individual is a conflict
between the ancien régime and modernity. Elisabeth in this way becomes
another allegory of modernity in the sense that “autonomy” is a figu-
ration of modernity. With the death of the individual person, the alle-
gorical body of the empress becomes visible and available even though
the corpse was kept concealed. People in Vienna lined up for hours to
see the laid-out empress, only to find a closed coffin.71 The repetitive
narratives about her beauty, grace, dignity, the evocation of the ideal
woman,72 became ritual incantations. The absence of the individual
67 Susanne Von Falkenhausen, “Geschichte als Metapher—Geschlecht als Symp-

tom: Die Konstruktion der Nation im Bild,” in Geschichtsdiskurs Volume 3: Die
Epoche der Historisierung, ed. Wolfgang Küttler, Jörn Rüsen, and Ernst Schulin
(Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997), 190.
68 Von Falkenhausen, “Geschichte als Metapher,” 187.
69 Sigrid Schade, Monika Wagner, and Sigrid Weigel, “Allegorien und Geschlech-
terdifferenz: Zur Einführung,” in Allegorien und Geschlechterdifferenz (Vienna:
Böhlau, 1994), 3.
70 Probably the most-quoted reference for this discourse is Otto Weininger,
Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Vienna: Braumüller,
1903).
turns into the presence of the metaphysically elevated empress. Elis-

abeth’s death fills a gap that existed for as long as she lived.
The ongoing process of allegorical interpretation to solve the riddle
of “Sisi” is at the same time part of the structure and the process of
mystification. The surplus of interpretation is typical for allegoric art-
works—similar to the endless attempts to grasp the real empress.73
A queer approach to this process could be finding ways to maintain
the strangeness of narrations and images instead of translating them
into a monolithic interpretation. In order to hold on to their foreign-
ness, it is useful to emphasize and to expose what irritates sense and
meaning: everything that is resistant, incoherent, fragmentary, and
lost. These interpretations look at those things that have been forgot-
ten, as Axel Schmitt says in his reflections on Bettine Menke’s book
“Prosopopoiia.” Schmitt refers to readings that care about “the traces
of the victims, the silenced voices of those who have been excluded
and marginalized by the official culture.”74 Queer readings share this
approach.
The attention to language can be linked to the search for another
subjective meaning, for something by-passed or easily ignored in the
inscribed text: the violence of discourse and the other, kept secret by the
author and suppressed by society.75 Sisi is not one single text, not one
single picture; Sisi is a discourse or even a “viscourse”76 that consists
of a bundle of diverse images that have one thing in common: they
depict something that is invisible—an attribute that is closely linked to
queer history. “Homosexuality” is defined by a compulsion to invisibil-
ity. Homosexuals have been forced to hide, and at the same time, sus-
picious individuals have been made to “come out” in order to become
visible in a manner legible to a normative culture.
The idea of a magic correspondence between image and the
depicted person, familiar from religious practice like the worshipping
73 Schade et al., “Allegorien,” 1; Schlipphacke, “Melancholy Empress,” 232–255.

74 Axel Schmitt, “Wen kümmert’s, wer spricht? Bettine Menke untersucht die
rhetorische Figur der Prosopopoiia in romantischen Texten und bei Kafka,”
Available at: http://literaturkritik.de/id/5211 (accessed November 2, 2017).
75 Schmitt, “Wen kümmert’s, wer spricht?”
76 Karin Knorr Cetina, “Viskurse der Physik,” in Mit dem Auge denken: Strategien
der Sichtbarmachung in wissenschaftlichen und virtuellen Welten, ed. Bettina Heintz
and Jörg Huber (Zürich: Voldemeer, 2001). Cetina speaks, with regard to scien-
tific research, of “viscourses.” She argues that visual logics play a central role in
the constitution of knowledge in (natural) science. Meanwhile, the term “vis-
course” has also been adopted in other disciplines, such as sociology. See also
Martina Heßler, ed., Sammelband Konstruierte Sichtbarkeiten: Wissenschafts- und
Technikbilder seit der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005).
266 Sissi’s World
of Christian orthodox icons,77 was resurrected in the nineteenth century

by the then new medium of photography. The process of producing a
picture by light that touches an actual person is uniquely fascinating.
The immanent promise of photography is truth and immortality. Both
are, of course, fictions, but for the process of iconicization photogra-
phy is of paramount importance.78 There are several photographs of
Elisabeth, thousands of Romy Schneider, and many of Romy as Sissi.
Both Sisi and Romy enmeshed themselves in complex image politics in
the attempt to gain agency and power over their own image. Not only
did others put various masks of ideal femininity on Elisabeth; she her-
self pursued an idolatry of her body. She developed images of herself
inspired by poetry and fine arts, especially Greek mythology and the
works of Heinrich Heine.
Knowingly and unknowingly, at once, she [Elisabeth] adds new
poetical substance to the circulating Elisabeth photos. Elisabeth play-
fully develops her own spectacle, mostly inspired by readings and role
models.79 The proliferation and amalgamation of images of different
narrative contexts increases the idiosyncratic nature of the person. An
absence, an emptiness, is filled by images. The reproduction and recep-
tion of images by the media is not concerned with historicity or the spe-
cific context of an image’s production. Whether the picture is private
or shows the person acting a part does not matter. The sheer quantity
and availability of photographs—especially via new media to entitled
producers, publishers, readers, viewers, and spectators—makes use of
these pictures, intensifying and accelerating a seemingly paradoxical
process of an obscene consumption of life. Especially in dealing with
images, (social) media increasingly operates like an image shredder
that destroys evidence.
In the case of Elisabeth’s “image policy,” we find a twofold strategy.
On the one hand, she changed traditional forms of representation of the
sovereign by making the images of her theatrical. She replaced dynas-
tic representation with the self-dramatization of a monarch stepping
out of the ceremonious court.80 On the other hand, she disappeared.
By imposing a ban on images of herself and by vanishing behind veils
77 The word “icon” stems from the Greek “eikon”—visual representation, spitting
image. See Friedrich Kluge (in cooperation with Elmar Seebold). Etymologisches
Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (23rd edn) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999), 326; Frank
Büttner and Andrea Gottdang, Einführung in die Ikonographie: Wege zur Deutung
von Bildinhalten (Munich: Beck, 2006), 30. The Byzantine idea of the image follows
the doctrine of the close relationship between the image and the represented per-
son. Everything creates an image of itself that corresponds to the cosmic princi-
ple of similarity in form.
and visors, she preserved the appearance of timeless beauty.81 Just one
photograph, made in 1870, shows the “Empress in later years,” and it
is used when the subject of dignified imagery is required. It is the most
effective picture of the Roman Catholic monarch: clad in a dark and
high-necked dress, with a heavy silver cross on her chest, she puts the
“leering beholder in his place.”82
Lisa Fischer interprets these strategies as individual protests against
a violent patriarchal system. Via her body modifications, her obses-
sion with slenderness, the attempt to shape an androgynous body, she
rejected the concept of female “nature.” By creating and preserving an
ideal image of herself for eternity, she rejected an image of bourgeois
privacy.83 For the feminist reception of Elisabeth, this idea of the empress
as a rebel against patriarchal structures has been acutely important.
Still, veils, fans, and visors as requisites of disappearing are not only
political strategy or tools of a radical beauty policy, as Juliane Vogel
points out.84 Especially the veil is also coded as an accessory of seduc-
tion. The veil is part of a mythology of disguise and revelation in which
the cognition of femininity, but also of truth and beauty, are symbol-
ized. The truth and the beauty of the woman, the true “self” shimmers
through the slightly transparent fabric that creates the “mystic obscu-
rity”85 out of which future memory will be produced.
The veil, of course, not only obscures the cognition of truth and
beauty but is also a symbol for secrets, for things that must be hidden.
Invisibility in this sense is a topos of queer history and is central to
reflections in queer theory. Seeing gender not as innate in the body but
as a visible performance is central to queer theory. The consequences
of this idea are at the center of intensive debates on identity politics86
which often draw on Foucault, who sketches out sexual identity as
historically and geographically contingent, while foregrounding the
modern mechanism of confession as producer of sexual identity.87
Taking up his ideas, Sedgwick and others question the epistemologi-
cal implications of “coming out of the closet.”88 While some scholars

83 Lisa Fischer, Schattenwürfe in die Zukunft: Kaiserin Elisabeth und die Frauen ihrer
Zeit (Vienna: Böhlau, 1998), 71.
86 Linda Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2005), or Johanna Schaffer, Ambivalenzen der Sichtbarkeit: Über die
visuellen Strukturen der Anerkennung (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008).
87 Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality I, translated by
Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998).
88 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 2007). Kenneth Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and
Social Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2002).
268 Sissi’s World
argue that presenting a sexual group identity is a central mechanism

to create awareness, others contend that this would create a norm that
makes other people or groups invisible.89 The ambivalences of the pride
of showing and the shame of hiding (homo-)sexualities have been
explored in numerous studies.90 Whereas the visibility of queer lives
has been an important aim in queer politics as well as in all emancipa-
tory movements of minority groups, it has also been debated at what
price what kind of visibility can be achieved. The entanglement of the
concept of gay visibility with capitalist consumption and racist notions
of white supremacy is the focus of such debates.91
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick discussed “visibility” in the context of an
“Epistemology of the Closet,” which she identified as both a resistant
and a productive narrative structure.92 It was the epistemology of the
closet that provided gay culture and identity in the twentieth century
with a consistent narrative. Kosofsky Sedgwick describes the charac-
teristic space of existence for gay people (the closet) as a double bind,
reflecting a simultaneously forced and forbidden publicity. She sees the
closet as the defining structure of gay oppression in the twentieth cen-
tury involved in all pseudo-symmetrical oppositions like private and
public, male and female, natural and artificial. The closet plays a role in
many forms of suppression, but it is particularly central to homopho-
bia.
Elisabeth’s image policy took place at the onset of modern sexology
in the nineteenth century. The term “homosexuality” was coined in
1868 by Karl Maria Kertbeny. Richard Krafft-Ebing used the word in his
Psychopathia sexualis from 1886 on. The “invention” of homosexuality
in a pathological sense can be attributed to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1864
“Uranismus”) and Carl Westphal (1870 “contrary sexual sensations”)
who fought against the criminalization of “sodomists.”93 Paradigmatic
change happened because of a shift in discourse: the modern “homo-
sexual” subject emerged in the late nineteenth century.94 And with this
new concept, the homosexual closet gained currency. This is pertinent to
our topic insofar as the meaning of “closet” is now specifically coded.
89 Lory Britt and David Heise, “From Shame to Pride in Identity Politics,” in Self,
Identity, and Social Movements, ed. Sheldon Stryker, Timothy J. Owens, and Rob-
ert W. White, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
90 Zülfukar Çetin and Heinz-Jürgen Voß, eds., Schwule Sichtbarkeit—schwule Iden-
tität: Kritische Perspektiven (Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2016).
91 Rosemary Hennessy, “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture,” Cultural Critique
29 (1994): 31–76.
92 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet.
93 See Ulrike Repnik, Die Geschichte der Lesben- und Schwulenbewegung in Österreich
(Vienna: Milena, 2006).
94 Franz X. Eder, Kultur der Begierde: Eine Geschichte der Sexualität (Munich: Beck,
2009), 153.
If somebody had a secret, it could be this secret. But what can be seen?
What must remain unseen? Biographers discussed Elisabeth’s sexual-
ity and agreed that she must have felt sexually unfulfilled and lived
in celibacy for most of her life.95 Her interest in beautiful women was
interpreted as an interest in beauty itself, and her close friendship with
women was, of course, not “contaminated” with a lesbian desire. Actu-
ally, with Alexander Doty I ask why we resist a queer reading of Sisi?96
Why should we deny queer codes? Of course, the question should not
be geared towards a sexual “identity,” since sexual preferences can have
very different meanings to different people. But how do certain cate-
gorizations work? How does the dominant presumption concerning
Elisabeth’s sexuality—she was asexual or did not like sexuality—work?
What if we understand Sisi as an allegory of the closet? In the process
of allegorization, any evidence about a historical figure is transcended
into a quasi-metaphysical realm of timeless, desireless non-existence.
At the same time, the endless repetition of the question of “truth” can
only be interpreted, according to a homo/hetero binary in the sense of
an insight, as sexual insight. Elisabeth had fulfilled her reproductive
duties; she had proven herself as a “woman” under public scrutiny.
Elisabeth had to show herself publicly, but she eventually refused the
viewers any glimpse: reports after her death document how sexually
loaded this look was. Various men boasted of catching sight of her; the
desire for the private body of the Empress could not be quenched.97
Elisabeth’s control of her images, the use of veils and other means of
“hiding” generates a closet in which the female becomes invisible. Fem-
ininity is not least constituted by a male heteronormative gaze at the
female body as a sexually available body. By ending the image produc-
tion Elisabeth was able to end being sexualized as a person, whereas
the iconic body of female beauty was made available for all time. This
body—Sisi—is still available as an object of unlimited access.
The topos of the asexual Empress already suggests a process of clos-
eting: Sisi as an allegory of the closet has the double task of revealing
and concealing, of unveiling. By moving into the closet, Sisi exhibits
what people want to see, what they want to be true. What can we see?
Sisi as an allegory of the closet allows us to realize how the homo/
heterosexual definition in Western epistemology works. The deictic
95 Elisabeth’s poem “Poetic Diary” is often quoted in this context, especially the
first stanza of this “‘Anti-Trinklied’: ‘Für mich keine Liebe, / Für mich keinen
Wein; / Die eine macht übel, / Der andre macht spei’n!’,” in Das poetische Tage-
buch, ed. Kaiserin Elisabeth (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 1997).
96 Alexander Doty, Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2000), 2.
97 Vogel, Elisabeth von Österreich, 162ff.
270 Sissi’s World
gesture which is inherent in the revelation of the object to be revealed

indicates “homosexuality,” the secret to which the closet always points.
I have discussed Sisi as a queer icon on two related levels. First, there
is a mode of parody established in the “Sissi” films which I think is
crucial to the reception of Sisi as a queer icon. Important for the films is
the double doubling of bodies and representations of “Elisabeth” and
“Romy Schneider,” which includes a dimension of parody. The second
level is a specific process of allegorization of the Empress beginning
with the death of the real person. The double movement of concealing
(the real person is absent/dead) and revealing (images/staging of the
public person) makes Sisi an allegory for the homosexual closet that is
defined by the coercion of the homosexual person into hiding—always
with the threat of being exposed and/or pressured to “come out” at
some point. In both cases the public insists on its “entitlement” to see
the truth. But the revelation needs to be covered again; an allegory is
constituted by its inscribed mystery. In this way Sisi can be understood
as a discourse that creates an infinite loop of mystification and knowl-
edge—that is, of course, always already sexual.98
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Eleven
Imagining Austria: Myths of
“Sisi” and National Identity
in Lilian Faschinger’s
Wiener Passion
Anita McChesney
The life of Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie von Wittelsbach has all the ingre-
dients of a tragic fairy tale. Her biography alone conveys an intriguing
story from her royal birth as Bavarian Duchess in 1834 to the teenage
marriage to Emperor Franz Josef I that thrust her into the international
limelight as Empress of Austria and then later Queen of Hungary and
her assassination by an Italian anarchist in 1898. Yet it is not historical
fact that has made “Sisi,” as she is affectionately known, one of Aus-
tria’s most idolized national figures. Rather, numerous biographies,
news articles, paintings, and photographs during her lifetime and an
even greater production of biographies, novels, films, statues, a musi-
cal, and an entire museum following her death have constructed a myth
that has eclipsed any historical reality.1 Lilian Faschinger’s novel Wiener
Passion (1999) (Vienna Passion in English translation [2000]) highlights
the Empress’s role as a leading Austrian cultural icon by referenc-
ing images of Sisi from over one hundred years of Austrian history.
Faschinger’s text sets itself apart, however, by blurring the boundaries
between fact and fiction. Neither the completely historical figure nor a
completely fictionalized character, Sisi is a variable image that reflects
the characters’ views of the nation and their place in it. Through the
semi-factual, semi-fictional images the novel suggests that Empress
Elisabeth, like the Austria she represents, is a mythological projection
of self that shapes the nation’s cultural identity. These myths, the novel
1 For a comprehensive look at representations until 1986 see the exhibition catalog
Elisabeth von Österreich: Einsamkeit, Macht und Freiheit (Vienna: Eigenverlag der
Museen der Stadt Wien, 1987).
276 Sissi’s World
shows, have the potential to connect and create as well as to divide and
destroy.
Wiener Passion is often read as a critique of Austrian society and cul-
ture. Lynne Hallam and Eva Kuttenberg, for example, show how the
text references familiar cultural traditions to challenge idealized images
of Austria’s past. They demonstrate how romanticized myths such
as that of the Habsburg Empire obscure the reality of ongoing social
oppression and inequality and impede the protagonists’ attempts to
establish their identity within their society.2 While these analyses of
Faschinger’s novel emphasize the central role of Austria’s patriarchal
monarchical tradition and of Emperor Franz Josef, Empress Elisabeth
receives only passing mention.3 Yet references to Sisi form a thread that
binds together the novel’s three first-person narratives and two time
periods, and they are essential to the image the characters paint of Aus-
tria through its cultural capital, Vienna. Moreover, depictions of the
Empress throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts
reflect the characters’ struggles to define their identities in a multi-cul-
tural Austria. A second aspect missing in readings of Wiener Passion is
a connection between the protagonists’ search for cultural identity and
a broader notion of how national cultural identity is constructed. My
analysis of Wiener Passion brings new insights to Faschinger’s critical
commentary on Austria by considering how images of the celebrated
Empress Elisabeth embody a conception of the nation and its members
that contains within it a postcolonial critique. This paradigm is particu-
larly productive given the characters’ multiethnic backgrounds.
According to postcolonial theory, modern nations define them-
selves through the images they create and project. Drawing on Benedict
2 See, for example, Eva Kuttenberg, “A Postmodern Viennese Narrative: Lilian

Faschinger’s ‘Wiener Passion,’” Monatshefte 101, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 73–87;
Regina Kecht, “Faschinger’s Aesthetic Analysis of Power Relations in Wiener
Passion,” Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik 39 (2006):
18–30; Lynne Hallam, “Intertextual Interventions in the Novels of Marlene
Streeruwitz and Lilian Faschinger,” (PhD dissertation, University of Notting-
ham, 2012); and Ellie Kennedy, “‘I Need an Audience’: Performing Identity in
Lilian Faschinger’s Feminist Picaresque Novels,” in Winning Back Lost Territory:
The Writing of Lilian Faschinger, ed. Vincent Kling and Laura McLary (Riverside,
CA: Ariadne Press, 2014), 92–126.
3 The lack of attention to Sisi is surprising given that the arguments highlight
Faschinger’s feminist agenda to “give women a voice.” See Hallam, “Inter-
textual Interventions,” 210. Hallam, Kennedy, and Kecht all consider the two
female narrators, Rosa and Magnolia, as alternative voices to represent a culture
shaped by male narratives and patriarchal institutions. Highlighting Sisi’s cen-
tral role as an alternate (female) symbol of Austria can demonstrate an addi-
tional means of giving women voice in that it re-engenders Austria’s cultural
narrative.
Lilian Faschinger’s Wiener Passion 277
Anderson’s famous dictum that the nation is an “imagined commu-

nity,”4 Anthony D. Smith suggests that members of this “imagined
community” invent the nation and national identity by continually
reproducing and reinterpreting the myths, symbols, and traditions that
make them unique.5 Stuart Hall emphasizes the process of invention
even more forcefully to assert that nations and national identities are
inseparable from their representation.6 For him, the fabrications pro-
duce the meanings around which individuals and communities form
a cultural identity. In Hall’s words, “National cultures construct iden-
tities by producing meanings about ‘the nation’ with which we can
identify; these are contained in the stories which are told about it,
memories which connect its present with its past, and images which
are constructed of it.”7 Reconsidering Wiener Passion through the lens of
a postcolonial critique of the nation-state, I examine how Faschinger’s
representation of Sisi elucidates the ways in which cultural narratives
have been used to construct identity in the “imagined community” of
Austria. Recurring depictions of the Empress in the nineteenth- and
twentieth-century accounts reflect the characters’ attempts to form
their identity and to find their place in Austrian society by reproducing
and personalizing such national cultural images. While the images of
Sisi and Austria point to the constructive role of such myths, they also
reveal their destructive potential. Faschinger’s novel shows how fab-
rications of nation and self can play an integrative role, allowing indi-
viduals to imagine a sense of belonging. Yet at the same time the myths
can be exclusionary as select features are idealized and others rejected.
Indeed, the perpetuating images create an ongoing cycle of unreflected
self-representation that can become a substitute, even an impediment,
to necessary social and political change. My analysis demonstrates how
Wiener Passion uses the semi-factual, semi-fictional images of Empress
4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 15.
5 Anthony D. Smith, The Cultural Foundations of Nations: Hierarchy, Covenant and
Republic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 19.
6 Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in Modernity: An Introduction to
Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 612.
7 Hall, “The Question,” 613. While they have much in common, Smith and Hall’s
theories differ in the extent to which they see nation as a pure product of rep-
resentation. Smith criticizes postmodern readings such as Hall’s, which for him
reduce the nation to a “narrative,” a “discourse,” and a “text” whose meaning
can be grasped solely through its symbolic and artistic creations. For him, this
approach defines nations too narrowly as products of social engineering and as
the artificial creations of intelligentsias. My reading of Faschinger shows how
the novel problematizes notions of national identity by suggesting, in a manner
similar to Hall’s, how it is “formed and transformed within and in relation to
representation.” Hall, “The Question,” 612.
278 Sissi’s World
Elisabeth to expose Austria’s idealized image of self and, on a broader

scale, to reveal the blind spots inherent in images used to imagine and
reify cultural identity.
References to Sisi’s mythical status in Wiener Passion draw on a
rich tradition of portraying the Empress. Little was known about the
famously reticent Empress during her lifetime, but her enigmatic
life and personality furnished all of the ingredients to inspire popu-
lar myth. Her independence, aversion to monarchical tradition, and
increasing withdrawal from public life only fueled speculations about
eccentricities such as her extravagant wardrobe, preoccupation with her
beauty, obsessive exercise regimen and unusual diet, and her constant
travel.8 Yet whether purportedly biographical or admittedly fictional,
the contemporaneous images of Sisi share a fairy tale tinge. Already
in the late 1800s one of Elisabeth’s ladies in waiting, the Landgravine
von Fürstenberg, asserted that the Empress’s life can be captured only
by legends and not by history.9 Later biographers have also conceded
the difficulty of distinguishing fact from legend.10 The countless depic-
tions of Empress Elisabeth in the subsequent 150 years have perpetu-
ated myths of the person Sisi and, with them, myths of the Austrian
nation. The qualities associated with the Empress have been repeatedly
mapped onto those of Austria, whether in the late nineteenth-century
Austro-Hungarian Empire in which she ruled or in the Republic of Aus-
tria that followed. A few prominent examples are the Sisi monument
in the Volksgarten in Vienna from 1907,11 Ernst Marischka’s three Sissi
8 See for example Brigitte Hamann, The Reluctant Empress, trans. Ruth Hein (New
York: Knopf, 1986), 11–13.
9 “Neither chisel nor brush can depict her as she really was, or that something
about her which had such power to attract and captivate, for it was a thing
peculiar to herself. She will live on in legend, not in history.” Egon Caesar Corti,
Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, trans. Catherine Alison Phillips (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1936), v.
10 In their respective biographies on Empress Elisabeth in 1936, 1986, and 1992,
Corti, Hamann, and Vogel concede the difficulty of distinguishing history and
legend. Corti, Elizabeth, v–vi; Hamann, Reluctant Empress, vii–x; and Juliane
Vogel and Gabriela Christen, Elisabeth von Österreich: Momente aus dem Leben
einer Kunstfigur (Vienna: Brandstätter, 1992), 13–15.
11 For more on the Sisi monument in the Volksgarten see Vogel and Christen; and
Regina Schulte, “The Queen—A Middle-Class Tragedy: The Writing of History
and the Creation of Myths in Nineteenth-Century France and Germany,” Gen-
der & History 14, no. 2 (August 2002): 266–93. For an overview of the various
monuments commemorating the Empress in Vienna see Renata Kassal-Mikula,
“‘Kaiserin Elisabeth-Denkmäler’ in Wien, 1854–1914,” in Elisabeth von Österre-
ich: Einsamkeit, Macht und Freiheit [exhibition catalog] (Vienna: Eigenverlag der
Museen der Stadt Wien, 1987), 84–101.
films from 1955 to 1957,12 and the numerous portrayals of the Empress
in the 1990s that culminated in the “Sisi Year” in 1998 commemorating
the one-hundredth anniversary of her death.13 Despite their differing
media and time periods, these representations all create a sentimental-
ized image of the Empress and, with it, an idealized image of Austrian
history and culture.
Lilian Faschinger’s 1999 novel Wiener Passion comes on the heels
of the Sisi Year in 1998. Recurring descriptions of Elisabeth explicitly
reference the long tradition of depicting a romanticized Empress and
Austria, including historical biographies, the Sisi monument, and
Marischka’s films. Yet unlike the sources it references, Faschinger’s
novel erases distinctions between the historical figure and its mythical
representation. The semi-factual, semi-fictional images of Sisi spotlight
instead the role of such myths in imagining cultural identity. Depictions
of the Empress in Wiener Passion are woven into a historical fiction com-
prised of three narrative perspectives and set in two time periods, late
nineteenth-century and late twentieth-century Vienna. Josef Horvath,
a 29-year-old Viennese native with Austro-Hungarian roots, and Mag-
nolia Brown, a 33-year-old Austro-African-American visitor from New
York, give voice to Vienna in the 1990s. Inserted into their alternating
stories is Rosa Tichy Havelka’s fictional autobiographical account of
immigrating to Vienna in the 1890s that Magnolia finds in an old chest
in her Aunt Pia’s house. She later discovers that the North-Bohemian
immigrant was her great-grandmother. The disparate narrative voices
12 For insightful claims about the films’ role in constructing Austrian identity in the
founding years of the Second Republic see Mary Wauchope, “Sissi Revisited,” in
Literature, Film, and the Culture Industry in Contemporary Austria, ed. Margarete
Lamb-Faffelberger (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 170–84; Nadja Krämer,“Mod-
els of Masculinity in Postwar Germany: The Sissi Films and the West German
Wiederbewaffnungsdebatte,” in A Companion to German Cinema, ed. Terri Gins-
berg and Andrea Mensch (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 341–78; and
Caitlin Gura, “The Austrian Aschenputtel: Empress Elizabeth of Austria as Icon
of Austrian National Identity,” The Trinity Papers (2011–present) (2013). Trinity
College Digital Repository, Hartford, CT. Available at: http://digitalrepository.
trincoll.edu/trinitypapers/20 (accessed November 2, 2017).
13 Examples include “Sisi the Musical” (1992), exhibits such as “Elisabeth, Eter-
nal Beauty” at the Schönbrunn and Hofburg Palaces in Vienna (1998–1999), Sisi
tours, fan clubs and websites, and over 200 commemorative products. For more
on the exhibits see Brigitte Hamann, and Elisabeth Hassmann, eds. Elisabeth:
Stages in a Life (Vienna: Brandstätter), 1998. Numerous articles and books have
also compared Sisi and Lady Diana, most recently the entry “Elisabeth, Empress
of Austria,” in Encyclopedia of World Biography, Encyclopedia.com (July 24, 2016),
Available at: http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-alma-
nacs-transcripts-and-maps/elisabeth-empress-austria (accessed November 2,
2017), and Allison Pataki’s historical novel The Accidental Empress (New York:
Howard Books, 2015).
280 Sissi’s World
and time periods in Wiener Passion construct a multifaceted image of

Vienna through the lens of divergent cultural backgrounds, classes, and
genders. Faschinger’s novel connects their tales to each other, to the
city, and to Austria with recurring references to iconic Austrian figures
and places that shape their experiences in Vienna, central to which is
the Empress Elisabeth.14 The recurring references to the Empress mirror
the characters’ conception of the Austrian nation and their place in that
community, along with its ideals and contradictions.
The bulk of the novel is narrated via Rosa Tichy Havelka’s first-per-
son account of Vienna in the late nineteenth century. She writes her
life story in 1900 from a cell of the Landesgericht (Provincial Court) as
she awaits execution for the murder of her husband, Karel Havelka.
Sisi already appears at the beginning of Rosa’s tale, which goes back
to her childhood in the Bohemian spa town of Marienbad, where she
was born as the illegitimate daughter of a Bohemian cook and the Vien-
nese Deputy Spa Director. Even on the margins of the empire, Rosa’s
education in Bohemia exposes her to idealized depictions of the beauti-
ful, extravagant Empress Elisabeth. The Viennese governess of the spa
director’s daughters (Rosa’s half-sisters) idolizes Sisi and teaches the
three girls to pray for safety and protection for “our Emperor Franz
Josef and our beautiful Empress Sisi.”15 The governess impresses on the
girls this sense of national belonging, and she also inundates them with
stories about the royal courtship and marriage. The stories emphasize
in particular the extravagant trousseau Sisi brought with her to Vienna
in 25 large trunks, including “the gossamer-fine pink silk dress with its
wide crinoline, the white lace mantilla and the little white hat in which
the future Empress had gone by boat to meet her bridegroom.”16 This
dress resurfaces throughout the novel and, like other repeated details
from Sisi’s life, emphasizes the staying power of such images in percep-
tions of national culture.
Rosa’s two half-sisters are enamored of the descriptions of the
Empress’s beauty and wealth. Indeed Rosa describes their obsession
as a form of worship by comparing their view of Sisi to her devotion to
the holy Madonna of Lourdes.17 These first narratives of “our beautiful
14 For a detailed discussion of the imperial, cultural, and residential Viennese

places and spaces see Eva Kuttenberg, “Making and Remaking Vienna in Wie-
ner Passion [Vienna Passion],” in Winning Back Lost Territory: The Writing of Lilian
Faschinger, ed. Vincent Kling and Laura McLary (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press,
2014), 161–8.
15 Lilian Faschinger, Vienna Passion, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Review, 2000), 71.
All German quotations will be from Lilian Faschinger, Wiener Passion (Cologne:
dtv, 1999).
16 Faschinger, Vienna Passion, 72.
Empress” also leave an indelible impression on Rosa. Brief, subsequent

encounters with the Empress in Vienna echo the admiration for the
Empress’s beauty and elegance impressed on her as a child. Soon after
she arrives in the city, Rosa catches a brief glimpse of the Empress pass-
ing by in her carriage, “the outline of a profile behind a dark veil, with
a black fan being waved in front of it by a black-gloved hand.”18 In awe,
the immigrant asks a passer-by “whether the dark figure of the lady in
the coach had really been Empress Elisabeth, that beautiful (bildschöne)
young woman whose trousseau on her arrival in Vienna in 1854 had
contained four ball gowns, seventeen party dresses with trains, fourteen
silk gowns, nineteen summer dresses and sixteen hats …”19 Given her
brief, indistinct glimpse, Rosa’s lengthy description of the Empress’s
beauty and extravagant wardrobe can only stem from the elaborate
stories from her childhood. As the German word “bildschön” (literally
“pretty as a picture”) implies, Rosa’s view of Sisi derives from pictures,
from idealized past images, rather than present experience. Moreover,
when read with Hall’s understanding of cultural identity, “bildschön”
marks a broader discursive strategy for imagining national culture that
recurs throughout the novel. For Hall, national cultures are composed
of symbols and representations that form a discourse, which is, in his
words, “a way of constructing meanings which influences and organ-
izes both our actions and our conception of ourselves.”20 Sisi is one such
symbol that will repeatedly shape Rosa’s self-concept and her actions in
Vienna. This first contact foreshadows the young immigrant’s continu-
ing attempts to attribute meaning to her circumstances through ideal-
ized views of Empress Elisabeth.
Rosa’s admiration for Sisi notably mirrors her optimistic view of life
in the Austrian capital. When she first arrives, she describes her sur-
roundings in glowing terms: “The sun was shining, the streets were full
of elegant carriages and well-dressed people, the façades of the build-
ings and the many churches were adorned with statues, golden balls,
reliefs and coloured frescoes.”21 Her idealized valuation of Vienna pre-
disposes her to view Sisi positively, and vice versa. Imagining an elegant
empress and empire also determines her positive outlook on her cur-
rent situation. Having just found employment as a nanny for the aristo-
cratic von Schreyvogl family, she hopes to fulfill her dreams to forge a
new life in an elegant, culturally diverse Vienna. Rosa’s naïve idealism
disregards experiences that already indicate a less promising future.
She has already been fired from one position and is being mistreated by
Frau von Schreyvogl. Overworked and underfed, Rosa is clothed in an

20 Hall, “The Question,” 613.
282 Sissi’s World
ill-fitting, threadbare dress and sleeps in a tiny closet. Her employer is

also extremely bigoted against the lower classes and immigrants, as are
most of the middle- and upper-class residents Rosa encounters. Frau
von Schreyvogl forbids any contact between her twins and “common
children”22 (“Proletariat” in German23), and she eventually fires Rosa for
exposing her children to the “gang of vagabonds, ruffians and crooks”
in the Prater.24 By that point the immigrant has suffered greatly from
inhumane treatment by Frau von Schreyvogl and her husband, whose
sexual exploitation has already resulted in a pregnancy and an abor-
tion. These initial experiences foreshadow worse ones to come. Rosa’s
image of a “bildschöne” woman like that of a golden city glosses over
her experienced reality. On her first night in the capital city, Rosa had
expressed her optimistic view of Vienna: “It was worth putting up with
a few small inconveniences for the privilege of being in Vienna, indeed
the very centre of Vienna, that brilliant capital city.”25 Rosa’s positive
view of the Empress mirrors her incurable optimism about finding her
place in “that brilliant capital city” and her willingness to dismiss wide-
spread intolerance as “small inconveniences.” Envisioning a beautiful
city allows the young immigrant to imagine cultural inclusion that is
lacking in the lived reality of social, racial, and gender discrimination.
Rosa catches a second glimpse of Sisi several years later while work-
ing as a silver cleaner in the Hofburg Palace. Her description here ech-
oes the first, unremittingly positive image of the beautiful Empress:
“the sight of the Empress, no longer young but slim as a reed and in
my eyes wonderfully beautiful … has made an indelible impression on
my memory.”26 Despite Sisi’s advancing age and unfavorable stories
she has since heard from fellow employees, Rosa holds fast to her pos-
itive childhood impression. Her own image of the beautiful Empress
(“in my eyes”) once again correlates to her persistent hope of finding a
permanent place in Viennese society now that she works at the Hofburg
Palace and is married to Karel Havelka. Yet just as Rosa’s focus on the
Empress’s beauty disregards her advancing age, so too her optimistic
outlook disregards negative experiences, those “small inconveniences,”
even those imbued with widespread racism and sexism that will cause
her imminent defeat. In her brief time in Vienna, Rosa has worked for
a string of tyrannical employers, spent months in a mental institution
and jail, been a prostitute and a mistress to notables such as the Arch-
duke Rudolf, and has given birth to a daughter whom she gives up in
order to marry Karel, to name just a few of her misfortunes.

23 Faschinger, Wiener Passion, 246.
24 Faschinger, Vienna Passion, 220, 286.
Rosa’s views of Sisi are shaped by and perpetuate a national cultural

discourse that is based both on documented fact and popular myth.
Like Faschinger’s text, contemporaneous accounts of the Empress
revolve around her courtship, arrival in Vienna, her wardrobe, beauty,
obsession with exercise, and her constant travel abroad. Biographers
concede the impossibility of separating fact from legend about a figure
that captured the popular imagination of her time and has done so ever
since. Faschinger’s text makes no claims to separating historical reality
and myth and in fact exaggerates the blurred lines between the two dis-
courses. Rosa’s descriptions underscore the inevitable ambivalence of
such images. Her views illustrate how such narratives imagine a com-
munity and the identity of its members, much as articulated by postco-
lonial theory. In his description of the modern nation, Anthony D. Smith
emphasizes that the “imagined community” is an imagined social con-
struct rather than something based on an objective set of conditions
and facts or a “given.” National identity, he posits, is likewise imagined
through “the continuous reproduction and reinterpretation of the pattern of
values, symbols, memories, myths, and traditions that compose the distinctive
heritage of nations, and the identification of individuals with that pattern and
heritage.”27 Stuart Hall expands on how reiterating “the narrative of the
nation,” as he calls it, affects individuals’ cultural identity. He posits that
telling and retelling stories from the past creates meaning by allowing
the narrators to become part of a larger, pre-existing cultural narrative.
“As members of such an ‘imagined community,’ we see ourselves in our
mind’s eye sharing in this narrative. It lends significance and impor-
tance to our humdrum existence, connecting our everyday lives with
a national destiny that pre-existed us and will outlive us.”28 Smith and
Hall both emphasize how continuously reproducing and reinterpreting
the national cultural narrative can be used to construct personal mean-
ing, a strategy demonstrated by Rosa in Wiener Passion. She envisions
the Empress in a way that gives significance to her circumstances and
her search for identity. For the young female immigrant and domestic
servant on the margins of Viennese society, Sisi signifies the hope of
belonging to a community she sees as glamorous.
While Rosa’s imagined version of the empress and empire illus-
trates; on one hand, the constructive potential offered by symbolic
cultural narratives, on the other hand, her account also problematizes
such constructions by revealing the inherent contradictions. Rosa’s
account, like all of those in Wiener Passion, is written in the first per-
son and thus presented as a subjective account with all of its potential
biases. Yet, Faschinger emphasizes the ambiguity of Rosa’s depiction of
27 Smith, Cultural Foundations, 19, italics in original.

284 Sissi’s World
Austria in particular through the discrepancies between her idealized

cultural images and lived reality. When read against the backdrop of
her experiences, Rosa’s glowing descriptions of Sisi and Vienna accen-
tuate how cultural fabrications can gloss over “minor inconveniences”
to preserve predetermined views. A further indication of the ambigu-
ity of such views is the contrasting descriptions of Sisi by the female
Viennese residents Rosa meets. For example, while Rosa refers to the
veiled empress in her coach as the “beautiful young woman,” a female
bystander counters incredulously that her beauty is long gone.29 And
while Rosa marvels at Sisi’s legendary trousseau, the same bystander
claims that this extravagance is ruining the reputation of the nation
and its people.30 The two parallel narratives about the Empress point to
alternate perceptions of the same facts, both notably based on hearsay
and tinged by the bystanders’ respective subjective views. Elisabeth’s
beauty, whether real or gone, and her opulence, whether awe-inspiring
or ruinous, are two imagined conceptions of the same figure and the
empire she represents.
The contrasting depictions of Sisi highlight that whether posi-
tive or negative the images perpetuate an existing cultural discourse.
While elements are reinterpreted according to the respective views of
the empress, the city, and the empire, the overall contours affirm the
norms of the dominant cultural discourse. The focus on Sisi’s looks and
spending habits in the accounts reaffirms defined notions of feminine
beauty and class in national symbols. The impassioned descriptions of
Sisi invent the nation and national identity much as Hall and Smith
describe. They echo the view that members of a community imagine
their identity by continuously reproducing and reinterpreting “the pat-
tern of values, symbols, memories, myths, and traditions” that make their
community unique and by identifying with those patterns.31 Wiener
Passion pulls back the curtain to show the inherent contradictions in
images of an imagined community. Without an omniscient narrator to
provide a corrective, “factual” description of the Empress, Faschinger’s
novel calls on readers to recognize the impossibility of separating real-
ity from fantasy and fact from myth. In showing the conflicting narra-
tives beneath the seemingly homogenous image of a beautiful empire
and empress, the novel also challenges the myth of a unified cultural
identity. Hall also questions the notion of cultural unity, suggesting that
national cultures are, in fact, “cross-cut by deep internal divisions and
differences, and ‘unified’ only through the exercise of different forms of
cultural power.”32 He identifies one such form of power as the portrayal

31 Smith, Cultural Foundations, 19.
of national identity as the “expression of the underlying culture of ‘one

people’” who share features such as “language, religion, customs, tradi-
tions, and feeling for ‘place.’”33 Cultural unity is thus a discursive device
that imagines difference as unity or identity, a strategy that unfolds in
Wiener Passion.
Faschinger’s novel exposes some of the “deep internal divisions and
differences” masked by symbols of unity through the contradictory
projections of Sisi. Similar contradictions are also manifest in competing
narratives about the Empire’s grandeur or its failings. Like its monarch,
Vienna and the monarchy can be seen as the seat of culture and prom-
ise or as the cradle of oppression and ruin. Wiener Passion foreshadows
these two discourses on Austria while Rosa is still in Bohemia. When
she meets Milan Havelka, Karel’s younger brother, and asks for help to
escape to Vienna, Milan tries to talk her out of her plan by debunking
the rosy, romanticized view of the city:
I probably had a totally inaccurate notion of Vienna, a romantic

picture that in no way reflected reality, Vienna wasn’t the city of
music, literature, painting and architecture it was misleadingly
represented as being, his older brother had written to him
saying Vienna was a witches’ cauldron, a huge city of workers
where people struggled for survival, where you slaved until you
collapsed in return for starvation wages and had to be careful you
didn’t end up pretty quickly in an asylum for the homeless.34
Milan paints two conflicting perspectives of Vienna: the romanticized

picture of a thriving cultural center or the reality of a witches’ caul-
dron. Yet both images are based not on personal experience but on sec-
ondhand discourse: on representations, or on family letters. The young
Bohemian revolutionary gives greater credence to the second, because it
corresponds to his preformed negative view of an oppressive Austrian
empire. Even before he travels to Vienna he informs Rosa that Austrians
are those “who oppressed the Czechs whenever they could.”35 Milan’s
reference to two views of Vienna foreshadows the contrast between
Rosa’s preconceived notions of a “brilliant capital city”36 and her lived
experience in a “witches’ cauldron.”37 She holds fast to the idealized
image of a welcoming multinational cultural center even while she
struggles for survival, works for starvation wages, and ends up in an
asylum, all while being continually put down for being a “Slav” and a

34 Faschinger, Vienna Passion, 136–7.
286 Sissi’s World
female. Her optimistic view of finding a place in the empire only crum-
bles at the very end, when she sits in the jail cell awaiting execution.
Reflecting back on her experiences, she hopes that sending her daugh-
ter with friends to America will provide her a better life, “a future very
likely to be a sad one in Austria-Hungary, a future that would have
obliged my daughter to tread the same thorny path that her mother had
trodden before her.”38 The thorny path (“dornenreiche[r] Weg”) that she
now concedes alludes to the Christian connotation of Passion from the
novel’s title as the path of suffering that led Christ to the cross.39 Rosa’s
via dolorosa forms a stark contrast to the elegant street she passionately
described on her arrival a few years earlier with its shining sun and
buildings adorned with “statues, golden balls, reliefs and coloured fres-
coes.”40 The contrasting views of the Austrian Empress and Empire in
Wiener Passion show how individuals create and cling to cultural fab-
rications to create meaning and belonging. The representations also
challenge the myth of a unified cultural identity. Concealed behind
the image of a beautiful empress and empire, Faschinger shows, are
countless less appealing narratives. Wiener Passion writes back against
a homogenized projection of Austrian culture by reinserting cultural
difference in terms of social class, race, and gender.
The Sisi myths in Faschinger’s text highlight the malleability of such
fabrications, and they also demonstrate their potential for real harm.41
Rosa clings to her idealized view of a welcoming, golden city to her own
detriment. Wiener Passion further underscores the potentially destruc-
tive consequences of such fabrications by showing how Karel Havel-
ka’s image of the Empress affects him and Rosa. Karel, Milan Havelka’s
older brother, has struggled to find his place as a Bohemian immigrant
in Vienna for many years. Despite his scathing descriptions of life in the
“witches’ cauldron” in letters to his brother, he idealizes one aspect of
the monarchy: the Empress Elisabeth. His admiration began at the age
of four when he caught a brief glimpse of her passing by in her coach
in Bohemia.
The Empress’s supernatural beauty as she smiled and waved to

her Bohemian subjects had impressed him deeply … Since then
he had never stopped thinking of the Empress, his first love,
taking a close interest in everything to do with her, and the fact

39 See also Kuttenberg’s reading of passion in the novel’s title in “Making and
Remaking Vienna,” 161–2.
41 See also Stuart Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed.
Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (London: SAGE, 1996), 4.
that she had grown older hadn’t made the slightest difference to
this passion, for passion it was.42
Like Rosa, Karel clings to an idealized, childhood image of “his first

love” and disregards incompatible information (such as her age). Even
though Karel admits that his passion has no real foundation, he recog-
nizes its profound impact on his life: “Such a passion, a passion with no
realistic basis at all, an affection that had already lasted decades … so
far had prevented his forming any significant connection with another
woman.”43 He also confesses that he was first attracted to Rosa because,
although she is blond and fair-skinned, she reminds him of Sisi.44 Kar-
el’s “passion” for Sisi, as he terms it, manifests itself in two contradic-
tory meanings of the word. As Kuttenberg notes, the word Passion, also
emphasized in the novel’s title, can refer to “an enthusiastic pursuit of
a love interest” or in the Christian tradition, it can mean “embarking on
a path of painful suffering.”45 In Faschinger’s novel Karel’s passion for
the Empress causes him and Rosa suffering as he attempts to transform
his wife into the object of his desire.
Already at their wedding, Karel orders a gown that resembles Sisi’s,
and the couple spends their honeymoon in Ischl like the monarchs.
Karel asks Rosa to emphasize her physical similarity to Sisi by donning
a chestnut-brown wig; he orders clothes for her patterned after those
worn by the Empress, and he demands that she join an athletic club
and even that she expose herself to a draught so she will cough like
Sisi.46 When Rosa finally refuses to fulfill her husband’s intensifying
demands, she comes home to find him dressed up like the Empress:
I found my husband standing in front of the long mirror in our

living room in one of the dresses copied from Sisi’s wardrobe,
the delicate rose-pink silk gown with its wide crinoline which she
had worn on her arrival in Vienna as the Emperor’s fiancée. When
I asked what he was doing, he said calmly perhaps I’d be good
enough to go into the bedroom and fetch the chestnut-brown wig
of genuine hair made by the wigmaker Schnabl in Papagenogasse,
put it on him and tell him how it suited him.47
The description of Karel dressed in the now familiar pink crinoline

gown and a chestnut-brown wig is a crass distortion of the picture

44 Faschinger, Vienna Passion, 350, 396–7.
45 Kuttenberg, “Making and Remaking Vienna,” 161.
46 Faschinger, Vienna Passion, 396, 412–14.
288 Sissi’s World
both Bohemian immigrants have cultivated since their childhoods.

This mimicry of the iconic and decidedly feminine image of Sisi under-
scores again the malleability of cultural representations. Moreover, the
transvestitism calls into question the seemingly fixed gender roles in
such depictions. The borders between male and female, it seems, are
imagined and just as porous as those between fact and fiction or real-
ity and fantasy. This scene prefigures disturbing behavior to come.
At Karel’s insistence, Rosa arranges a job for him in the royal stables
and smuggles him into Elisabeth’s chambers to glimpse the bathing
Empress. While Karel claims that seeing the now aging Empress will
certainly cure him of his passion, as might be expected, the plan back-
fires. Karel attempts to jump into the bathtub, Rosa loses her job, and
after seeing Sisi first hand, whom he describes as “a beautiful mer-
maid,”48 Karel is more obsessed with her than before. The reference to
the Empress as a “mermaid” underscores how the mythical image in
his mind obscures what he sees. Karel’s destructive obsession escalates
thereafter. He begins to stalk, rape, and eventually kill women who
resemble Elisabeth until Rosa ends his destructive course with a thrust
of a carving knife. The courts refuse to believe Rosa’s story, and she is
sentenced to death for her husband’s murder. In the end, Rosa literally
dies for his fantasy of national cultural identity.
The characters’ idealized and fetishized images of Sisi shape their
actions and self-concept until the bitter end. Faschinger also shows
the impact of these conceptions in the representation of their deaths. A
defining moment in the Sisi legends is her death. The assassination by
the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni helped create a narrative of national
sacrifice, which was then further used to reinforce associations between
Sisi and the empire as the helpless victims of foreign aggression. In stark
contrast to this “horrible, tragic reality”49 of history, as biographer Corti
describes the event, is its representation in Faschinger’s novel. In Wiener
Passion Lucheni’s stabbing of Sisi coincides with and is overshadowed
by Karel’s rapes and stabbings of multiple servants and waitresses who
resemble the Empress. This juxtaposition puts into sharp relief the dif-
ference between the story of the sacrificial imperial murder for political
gain and the deaths of common servants and waitresses due to Kar-
el’s sexual fetish. The fates of the two male murderers also could not
be more dissimilar. While the authorities quickly arrest and sentence
Lucheni, Karel’s serial killing must be stopped by his wife when the
police dismiss Rosa’s charges as the fabrications (“Hirngespinste”) of
an idle Viennese housewife. A final contrast between the historical and
fictional deaths is the momentary agency Rosa acquires against the male

49 Corti, Elizabeth, 493.
aggressor. Unlike the woman she admires and resembles, she defeats
the attacker rather than becoming his victim. This contrast subverts the
gender roles in the victim/perpetrator complex to question once again
the norms that shape cultural narratives.50 As is typical of Faschinger’s
novels, however, female agency is only temporary and Rosa is executed
by a justice system that dismisses her account as the rants of a poor,
hysterical female immigrant.
Both Rosa and Karel participate “in the idea of the nation as rep-
resented in its national culture,” to borrow Hall’s words.51 As both
Hall and Smith posit, the “imagined community” is fabricated by the
reproduction and reinterpretion of the myths, symbols, and traditions
unique to Austrian culture. The variable images of Sisi, like the alter-
nating depictions of Austrian Vienna that permeate Rosa’s account,
reinforce the ambivalence of such cultural images. Grounded in fan-
tasy, in projection and idealization, they reflect love or hate, intense
admiration or suffering, and often both. The thorny path can just as
easily be the sunny street, and the witches’ cauldron can be the golden
cultural capital at any given moment. Rosa’s and Karel’s fates give
readers a narrative of life in the Habsburg Empire that differs starkly
from their fabricated, idealized images of its Empress. Their fates show
how while individuals modify cultural images such as that of the Aus-
trian Empress and Empire to create their own sense of identity, those
images can also destroy them. Clinging to their idealized version of a
multicultural community, the characters are blind to their actual situa-
tion and, perhaps, even more susceptible to its dangers. Perpetuating
idealized national symbols also ensures that nothing will change in
the cultural values or comportment of the larger society that identifies
with and maintains those values. Normative views of class, race, and
gender are untouched. With their idealization of Sisi, Rosa and Karel
write themselves into an imagined community that ultimately destroys
them. While the characters fall victim to the illusion of cultural unity,
Faschinger’s novel offers her readers an expanded understanding. Wie-
ner Passion presents alternative narratives of imperial Austrian culture
that question the facticity, the norms, and the unified cultural identity
that the symbols project. These portrayals express a cultural identity
composed of diverse, contradictory experiences for members of various
social classes, racial backgrounds, and genders that has been silenced
by a discourse that imagines cultural unity.
50 See also Ellie Kennedy, who suggests that Faschinger uses modes of storytelling
to perform and subvert norms of identity, in particular the ways society engen-
ders the roles of perpetrator and victim. Kennedy, “Performing Identity,” 119.
290 Sissi’s World
The same imagined features of the Austrian Empress and Empire

from Rosa’s account can still be found in Vienna a century later, as seen
in the first-hand narratives of Josef Horvath and Magnolia Brown into
which her tale is interwoven. The parallels in the three accounts reinforce
the ways in which idealized images of a nation and national identity
are constructed over and against a more stark reality.52 In 1990s Vienna,
daily gossip still revolves around conflicting views of the Empress’s
appearance and her excesses, particularly amongst the elderly women
in Josef’s small circle of acquaintances. Josef’s pharmacist refers to
her as “our Empress Elisabeth,”53 claiming a sense of belonging much
like the governess in Marienbad a century before. She also holds up
the Empress as a role model, suggesting that Josef could improve his
poor health with a trip to Madeira, following in Elisabeth’s footsteps.
One of Josef’s elderly female neighbors sharply contradicts the phar-
macist’s positive view of the Empress. Calling her a “malingerer,”54
she claims that Elisabeth had faked illness so her subjects would pay
for the trips to Madeira. For her, Sisi is not “our Empress” but one of
“those vampires of the imperial house” who bled dry the people of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, such as her late father.55 This neighbor later
repeats her harsh critique of “that pro-Hungarian agitator the Empress
Sisi,”56 yet still notes with pride that her beloved spaniel shares the
Empress’s birthday. These reactions reflect the contradictory views and
impulses inherent in depictions of national culture. The references to
Sisi repeat the same positive and negative clichés as expressed by the
women in Vienna a century earlier. They are also just as skewed by
the individuals’ views of the city and the historical empire. The phar-
macist’s effusive praise for “our Empress” notably mirrors her love for
the welcoming city in which she was not born. By contrast, the neigh-
bor who describes Sisi as a disruption in “her” imperial country is a
Viennese native who continually expresses resentment toward foreign-
ers. The contrasting references show a continuing tendency to conflate
views of Austrian culture with images of the Empress. The women’s
motivations also demonstrate on a broader level some of the anxieties
that feed into notions of cultural identity.
52 For more on parallels among the three accounts, see Kuttenberg, “Making and
Remaking Vienna.” She describes the accounts as intersecting parallel texts that
comment on each other and suggests how their interaction produces images of
a city that is “continuously remaking itself along with its historic figures.” Kut-
tenberg, “Making and Remaking Vienna,” 175.
One hundred years later Sisi also continues to epitomize feminine

beauty. Magnolia’s Aunt Pia extols Sisi’s fabled looks and extravagant
wardrobe much like her predecessors. This admiration is particu-
larly evident in a scene when Magnolia finds her aunt watching Ernst
Marischka’s 1956 movie Sissi, the Young Empress (Sissi, die junge Kaiserin)
starring Romy Schneider. The images on the old black-and-white TV
are blurred, and the aunt regrets that she cannot clearly see “young
Romy Schneider in all her beauty in that wonderful film Sissi, the Young
Empress.”57 Since Magnolia is unfamiliar with the film, and her aunt
has seen it so often, Aunt Pia describes the story while they follow the
“indistinct outlines”58 on the screen. Yet the account reveals her diffi-
culty in separating fact and fiction.
It had been love at first sight, she said; over tea in Ischl, Karlheinz
Böhm had fallen head over heels in love with the tomboy that
was Sisi at the time, and she pointed to the light, bell-shaped
patch on the screen and said that must be the gossamer-fine silk
dress with its wide crinoline, worn with a white lace mantilla, in
which Romy Schneider, destined for so tragic a fate, had gone
by steamer to meet her fiancé, just imagine, leaving that funny
little court for the great wide world … it could never have turned
out well, Sisi’s death by suicide in Paris, the assassination of
Romy Schneider by an Italian anarchist in 1898 had been a threat
looming all along, just like the disastrous end of her own little
Wilma, there was nothing you could do about the dispensations
of Providence.59
Aunt Pia repeats details about the Empress already familiar to readers
from Rosa’s narrative. By this point, Magnolia has read multiple times
about the courtship, the crinoline dress, Sisi’s beauty, and her death.
Yet Pia’s account notably modifies these details by repeatedly confus-
ing the historical events and figures with the film version and actors.
In her rendition, Karlheinz Böhm (the actor portraying Franz Josef)
falls in love with the young Empress, Romy Schneider (the actress
portraying Sisi), who owns the fabled dress, and Romy is murdered
by an anarchist while Sisi commits suicide rather than vice versa. At
the end of her commentary Pia goes one step further to personalize
57 Faschinger, Vienna Passion, 185. See also Kuttenberg’s reading of Aunt Pia as the
epitome of the post-World War II consumer culture which sought to recreate
Austria’s official image and cultural identity with films like Marischka’s Sissi
trilogy. Kuttenberg, “Making and Remaking Vienna,” 175.
292 Sissi’s World
Austrian history and legends by connecting Sisi’s and Romy’s fateful

deaths, those “dispensations of Providence,” to her own daughter’s
tragic demise.60
Aunt Pia’s explicit confusion of fact and fiction points back to the
same, albeit more implicit, lack of distinction between the historical
and legendary Sisi in Rosa’s nineteenth-century account. Her version
of Sisi’s life also exemplifies how cultural identities are imagined by
inserting oneself into national narratives. Much as Hall describes it,
Aunt Pia gains a sense of significance and importance by connect-
ing her life to a pre-existing story of national destiny (the tragic end
of the Empress and Empire) that will outlive her and her daughter.61
Aunt Pia’s fabrication resembles the images of Sisi by Rosa, Karel, and
other Viennese residents in how she takes and reinterprets preformed
images. Yet in this version, Faschinger pushes the boundaries between
reality and fiction to the extreme. Readers later discover that Aunt Pia,
and not “Providence,” was responsible for her daughter’s death. Wilma
suffocated on fumes from the old cracked Biedermeier stove that the
mother refused to repair. Like the “indistinct outlines” on Aunt Pia’s TV
screen, her jumbled depiction pieces together discourses from history,
popular culture, and personal experience to blur present and past, fact
and fiction to a whole new degree. This comical scene reinforces the
ambivalence in images that imagine the identity of a community and
its members.
In Faschinger’s depiction of 1990s Vienna, Sisi epitomizes feminine
beauty not only for the women but also for the men. Like Karel a cen-
tury before, Josef Horvath projects his idealized image of Sisi onto the
parts of Austria he is most passionate about, most prominently his
late mother and the city of Vienna.62 When Josef praises his mother’s
beauty he describes her resemblance to Sisi. “She had been such a beau-
tiful woman, tall, with expressive dark eyes and long nut-brown hair,
and had been compared, not entirely without justification, to the late
Empress Elisabeth who perished in such unfortunate circumstances.”63
He uses similar language when he describes to Magnolia a portrait of
“his beautiful mother, who when alive had been credited, not entirely
unjustly, with some similarity to the assassinated Empress Sisi, one
of the most radiant creatures of her time.”64 Yet readers get the sense
that the resemblance Josef describes is more imagined than real. When

62 Hallam also notes that the Austrian Empress epitomizes Josef’s ideal of woman-
hood. Hallam, “Intertextual Interventions,” 222–3.
Magnolia looks at the photograph, rather than a radiant creature with

“expressive dark eyes” she sees a “thin, long-nosed woman” with
“piercing eyes.”65 And while Josef speaks of a faultless mother, Magno-
lia hears from a neighbor that she had actually been a stifling presence
in his life.66
Josef projects his adopted and adapted view of Sisi’s mythical
beauty onto his mother and later onto Magnolia as well. Josef is ini-
tially baffled by Magnolia, whose “alien”67 nature is radically differ-
ent from that of the elderly Viennese women he knows. However, he
starts to find her attractive once he begins to associate her with the
Empress and his mother.68 Just as Karel falls in love with the blond
Rosa after seeing in her his idealized, chestnut-haired Empress, so,
too, does Josef fall in love with Magnolia after adapting her to his Sisi
ideal. Less than a month later, Magnolia is pregnant, and they plan
to marry. Josef’s projection of Sisi doesn’t stop there. When he learns
Magnolia is expecting, he informs her they will name the baby Elis-
abeth, “after his mother who had looked so like Sisi, and in memory of
the beautiful Empress herself.”69 The future Elisabeth will perpetuate
his idealized image of femininity. While Josef’s desire to transform the
women closest to him into Sisi is not as explicitly destructive as Kar-
el’s, like his predecessor’s, his (male) gaze determines the identity of
those connected to him and subjugates them to his imagined cultural
image.
Josef’s veneration of Sisi is inextricably linked to his cultural identity
as an Austrian. His passion for Vienna, in both senses of the word, is
tied to idealized images of Habsburg Austria. He repeatedly empha-
sizes how Vienna’s perpetually bad weather is a challenge for someone
of his “delicate constitution,”70 yet even in his suffering he loves the city
because he draws strength from its rich monarchical past. Among Josef’s
favorite places to visit are the Central Cemetery and Imperial Capuchin
Crypt. In the crypt he describes being surrounded by the sarcophagi of

66 For a psychological reading of Josef’s relationship with his mother see Hallam,
“Intertextual Interventions,” 224–9.
68 Faschinger, Vienna Passion, 95–6. See also Hallam, who suggests that Josef refers
to images of the past such as Sisi’s in order to “understand the unfamiliar and
maintain his sense of security,” in particular when dealing with a contemporary,
independent woman like Magnolia who is so different from the women in his
small world. Hallam,“Intertextual Interventions,” 231.
294 Sissi’s World
monarchs such as Maria Theresa, Franz Josef, and Empress Elisabeth

as “an oasis of peace in a metropolis where the hectic and thoughtless
pace of life is perceptibly gaining the upper hand.”71 In fact, he begins to
fall in love with Magnolia while standing by Sisi’s sarcophagus. Much
like the other Viennese residents, Josef creates meaning for his life by
reproducing and reinterpreting images of Sisi and imperial Vienna.72
He creates a sense of peace and belonging as he struggles with poor
health, finances, and personal relationships by memorializing its past.
Magnolia Brown’s first-person account of Vienna in the 1990s ini-
tially appears to offer an outside perspective on Austria and to inter-
rupt the myths that imagine its culture. The aspiring Broadway singer
and New York native is half Austrian and half African-American. John
F. de Luca Junior, an aspiring Broadway producer and her lover, sends
her to Vienna for voice lessons to prepare for the role of Anna Freud in
an upcoming musical. Although she is part Austrian and speaks fluent
Viennese dialect, Magnolia knows little about her family’s immigration
to Vienna from northern Bohemia or of Austrian culture in general. Her
perspective is thus initially positioned as one from inside and outside
Viennese society.73 From this locus, Magnolia’s narrative reveals two
competing sides of the capital. Much as her great grandmother did one
hundred years before, the New Yorker comes to Vienna with visions of
a welcoming multinational cultural capital, only to encounter a hostile
city.74 From a fellow passenger on the plane from New York, Magnolia
had heard that “Vienna, the city of waltzes, had a very beneficial effect

72 See also Hallam, who suggests that Josef’s imagined city resembles the version
of the Habsburg myth that depicts a “picturesque, secure, and orderly fairy-tale
world” (“malerische, sichere und geordnete Märchenwelt”), Hallam, “Intertex-
tual Interventions,” 222–3. Hallam’s gendered reading of this description sug-
gests that Josef’s world view reinforces a male, authoritative version of history
in contrast to the accounts given by Rosa and Magnolia. Yet I would contend
that Faschinger also subverts this strategy by making Sisi and not Josef the cen-
tral figure in his idealized image of Vienna.
73 The novel emphasizes her cultural ignorance. Magnolia tells Josef that the only
classical Austrian song she knows is Schubert’s “The Trout” (“die Forelle”),
which her mother taught her as a child, and when he asks her if she knows Sisi,
Magnolia replies, “No, never heard of her” (104).
74 In many respects, Magnolia’s biography doubles Rosa’s. Kennedy suggests
that Faschinger juxtaposes so many elements from the two women’s lives to
emphasize the continuities in Vienna over the last century such as sexism and
racism rather than improvements. “Performing Identity,” 118. At the same time,
Magnolia’s experiences can be seen as a reverse mirror of Rosa’s. Magnolia
undergoes a positive development in Vienna while Rosa ends up in jail awaiting
execution. Allison Fiedler suggests that in this respect Faschinger’s novel is both
a “Bildungsroman and anti-Bildungsroman.” Quoted in Hallam, “Intertextual
Interventions,” 239.
on all kinds of dispositions.”75 She is, however, immediately repelled

by the adverse climate, the same “icy wind” and “wet, cold sleet” that
Josef also describes.76 While John extols Vienna as “the city of music,
where Schubert and Mozart had once lived and worked,”77 Magnolia
feels she has traveled a hundred years back in time.78 And while John
praises the superior methods of voice instructors in “the birthplace of
the immortal works of Viennese Classicism,”79 she finds Josef’s teaching
style outdated.
Like Rosa, the American visitor to Vienna also encounters persis-
tent racism from the residents. Josef’s neighbor, for example, directs
her dog to attack “that nigger!”80—the same neighbor whose spaniel
was born on Sisi’s birthday. The elderly lady issues a barrage of insults
about how “our blessed country” is being overrun by “such creatures
… populating it with their repulsive black brood” and bankrupting the
health care system with unnecessary spa visits.81 The neighbor’s unpro-
voked racist remarks echo the same complaints she had made about
Sisi, the foreigner and “pro-Hungarian agitator” who supposedly had
bled the country dry with her frequent health trips to Madeira. Mag-
nolia’s own aunt makes no secret of her dislike for those of a different
color. When the New Yorker first arrives, Aunt Pia exclaims “pretty
child, pretty child … but blacker than she’d expected” and sympathizes
with her cousin for giving birth to a child “as dark as this.”82 These
distinct expressions of racism appear to reflect widespread sentiments.
During Magnolia’s month in Vienna, newspapers are full of reports
about attacks on foreign women by right-wing nationalists. The open
animosity against Magnolia comes from the same Viennese residents
who express definitive views of Sisi and Austria. Social exclusion and
oppression, even aggression, the novel suggests, stem from a particular
imagining of Austrian identity that ascribes to a normative discourse of
race and gender.
The parallels between Rosa’s and Magnolia’s initial expectations and
lived experiences in Vienna emphasize the continuities in an imagined
community that has remained fundamentally unchanged over the
last century.83 Their narratives point to the continued use of cultural
images to suppress or exclude elements perceived as incompatible

83 For more on parallels between the narratives see Kennedy, “Performing Iden-
tity,” 118.
296 Sissi’s World
with the imagined national narrative. While both Rosa’s and Mag-
nolia’s experiences show the detrimental effects of idealized images,
Magnolia’s experiences can nevertheless be seen as a reverse mirror of
her great-grandmother’s. Rosa clings to her idealized image of Aus-
tria until her ensuing execution forces her to recognize her exclusion
from that society. Magnolia, by contrast, is immediately horrified by
the city and people she encounters. Unwilling to put up with “minor
inconveniences,”84 she determines to return home just two days after
her arrival. “An unwelcoming city, a grotesque great-aunt, and a use-
less singing teacher … I’d call first John and then the airport and catch
the next flight back to New York. Any other course of action would be
preposterous.”85 Yet while Rosa gradually recognizes the inequalities
around her, Magnolia increasingly disregards them until she is absorbed
into the cultural views around her and echoes their discourse.86
Magnolia begins to adopt a positive view of Vienna as she connects
personally to the city and its cultural history. Her reaction to the city
changes in proportion to her growing attachment to Josef and identifi-
cation with Rosa’s narrative. A major shift in Magnolia’s views on Aus-
tria occurs mid-way through the novel when she stumbles across the
Sisi monument in the Volksgarten: “I went through the Volksgarten,
and when I passed the statue of a beautiful woman who, as I gathered
from the inscription on its plinth, was Elisabeth of Austria, the same
Empress Sisi whom Josef Horvath had already mentioned twice and
who also surfaced several times in Rosa Havelka’s story, I went closer
to the stone sculpture.”87 While only brief, this description of Sisi signals
a turning point in Magnolia’s experience in Vienna. It follows a voice
lesson with Josef where she begins to find him attractive and his influ-
ence calming, and precedes the scene where she and Aunt Pia watch
Marischka’s Sissi movie, one of the first and only positive exchanges
between the two women. The chapter ends with Magnolia positively
describing the same aspects of Vienna she had previously reviled. She
reports to her mother on the phone, “after having a few initial prob-
lems adjusting to the place I was fine, I was getting accustomed to deaf
Aunt Pia and my singing teacher now, in spite of the bad weather which
hardly ever let up I quite liked Vienna.”88 She is now reluctant to return

86 Hallam similarly concludes that Magnolia is absorbed into traditional views of
culture. “At the end of the novel, Magnolia is overwhelmed by and subsumed
under the dominant discourse of the city, so that the outcome for her is an affir-
mation of what is already in place” (362). She sees Faschinger’s novel as an
exercise in irony and parody that discourages “any sense of nostalgic veneration
for old Vienna” (Hallam, “Intertextual Interventions,” 244).
to New York, and when John asks when she will return she replies, “I
was in sedate Vienna and not hectic New York, things went to their
own rhythm here and it wasn’t a good idea to hurry them along.”89 The
encounter with Sisi marks a reversal in her image of Vienna. Once the
site of suffering and exclusion, Vienna starts to epitomize the place of
peace, belonging, and cultural richness that its residents extol.
After one brief month, Magnolia no longer feels like an outsider but
rather a part of the city’s fabric. First, she senses a deep connectedness
to the historical city through her family’s heritage. Particularly after dis-
covering her kinship with Rosa, Magnolia feels bound to the sites from
Vienna’s cultural past. “I thought of my great-grandmother, who had
walked the same streets in this city a hundred years ago, and I suddenly
felt very close to her.”90 Second, the relationship with Josef intensifies
her sense of belonging in the present-day Vienna. Finally, when Mag-
nolia discovers she is pregnant and accepts Josef’s marriage proposal,
her plans to remain in Vienna secure a future attachment to the city.
In her analysis, Hallam suggests that the outsider Magnolia becomes
“gradually and intimately entwined with the city’s scripts.”91 Sisi is
central to these scripts. Magnolia constructs her identity by repeating
and reinterpreting cultural myths in a way that gives meaning to her
life and makes her part of a larger “national destiny,” in Hall’s words.92
Magnolia’s child plays a significant part in weaving her story into the
city’s mythical cultural landscape. By giving her child the name of the
renowned Austrian icon “Elisabeth,” the mother propagates a major,
idealized strand in Austria’s cultural narrative. Like those around her,
Magnolia reinterprets the imagined community of Vienna/Austria by
weaving herself into its textual landscape.
Magnolia’s image of Sisi and of Vienna helps her reimagine her own
cultural identity by connecting her life story to elements in the national
cultural narrative. Indeed, the city she describes at the end is strikingly
different in tone than the one of her arrival. The dismal city with its
grey and overcast sky, icy wind, wet, cold sleet, and slippery streets93 is
portrayed one month later as a place where “the sun was shining and
the cupola of the temple, made of countless gilded leaves, was gleam-
ing.”94 These words echo those in Rosa’s sparkling first description of
the same Viennese street, “The sun was shining … the façades of the
buildings and the many churches were adorned with statues, golden
balls, reliefs and coloured frescoes.”95 Magnolia’s narrative of Vienna

91 Hallam, “Intertextual Interventions,” 207–8.
298 Sissi’s World
ends where Rosa’s began. Yet while her great-grandmother’s vision of

the “brilliant capital city” had initially disregarded hostile elements of
the city as “minor inconveniences,”96 it is Magnolia’s penultimate view
of the gilded city that ignores indications that nothing has changed in
the environment around her.97 Her description of a gleaming Vienna is
immediately followed by an exchange with Aunt Pia that shows contin-
uing prejudice. When Magnolia tells her about the upcoming marriage
to Josef Horvath, the aunt replies that he is “an amazingly good catch
for a coloured girl.”98 Magnolia’s embrace of the myths of a beautiful
empress and a golden Austrian culture repeats and reinterprets existing
cultural images in a way that gives her a sense of belonging but does
nothing to change the culture itself. She embraces images that gloss
over the gender and racial inequalities and become tools to subjugate
and exclude. Her relationship with Aunt Pia remains unchanged, and
the seemingly happy ending with Josef is also suspect. In an interview
on Wiener Passion, Faschinger remarks on the prospects for Josef’s and
Magnolia’s future, stating:
The prospects are relatively poor! I think you have to take that
happy ending with a pinch of salt because [Josef] is basically quite
incapable of coping with life, plus he’s already beginning to act
in a domineering way. He tells her, you’re to move in with me
now, you’ll practice your music in the laundry room, and so on
… [T]he tongue is firmly in the cheek where that happy ending is
concerned.99
Magnolia’s fabrication of Sisi, Vienna, and Austria replicates the fic-

tional narratives by her Aunt Pia, Josef Horvath, Rosa Havelka Tichy,
and the vast body of fictional and historical representations they incor-
porate. Reproducing and reinterpreting cultural myths in a way with
which they identify gives meaning to the characters’ life story. On a
larger scale, they participate in imagining a community of which they
are a part. The myths, however, fundamentally blind the characters to
real inequality and leave its traditional tenets unchanged.100

97 Hallam, “Intertextual Interventions,” 243–4.
99 Ellie Kennedy, “Identity Through Imagination: An Interview with Lilian
Faschinger,” Women in German Yearbook 18 (2002): 27.
100 For more on how the ending affirms continuation rather than progress see
Kuttenberg, “Postmodern”; Kecht, “Power Relations”; Hallam, “Intertextual
Interventions”; and Kennedy, “Performing Identity.” While they also argue that
Faschinger’s text emphasizes the continuity of sexism and racism over the past
century, they draw these conclusions from theories on power, gender, and post-
modernity rather than from processes of imagining cultural identity as I do.
The imagining of Sisi and Austria in Wiener Passion suggests, like

many postcolonial theories, that national identities are “formed and
transformed within and in relation to representation.”101 Through the
semi-factual, semi-fictional representations of Sisi, Faschinger shows
that the Empress, like the Austria she represents, is a malleable collec-
tion of images, and the nation is an imagined community whose iden-
tity is constructed by layers of myths. While the novel illustrates the
creative and unifying function of cultural myths in constructing iden-
tity, it also points to the dangers in the ways myths project the qualities
of an imagined community and its residents onto others. The images of
Sisi and of Austria show how, in creating an imagined sense of belong-
ing, the fabrications select and reject, idealize and denigrate aspects
at odds with the narrative. The repeated images create an ongoing
cycle of unreflected self-representation that becomes a substitute, even
an impediment, to actual change. Rather than promote a new model
of social equality and progress, cultural images perpetuate cycles of
oppression and inequality by allowing disparate elements to partici-
pate in the existing, traditional narrative without changing its tenor.
The recurring images of Sisi in Wiener Passion demonstrate the ideals
and contradictions in cultural images. By drawing back the curtain on
the ambiguities in the processes of imagining cultural communities
such as Austria, Faschinger’s novel interrupts the cycle of unreflected
repetition and reinterpretation. Her novel exposes the social, racial, and
gender inequities masked by the myth of a unified cultural identity.
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Twelve
Cocteau’s Queen: Sissi
Between Legend, Spectacle,
and History in L’Aigle à deux
têtes
Elizabeth Black
Introduction
Jean Cocteau’s 1946 play, The Eagle Has Two Heads (L’Aigle à deux têtes),
and his subsequent 1948 film of the same name, have been considered
since their publication and distribution as a dialog between the cinema
and the theater, two dramatic arts seemingly in competition for dom-
inance in the mid-twentieth century.1 Both the play and the film are
based loosely on the life of Elisabeth of Austria. In his preface to the
play, Cocteau describes the connection between his fictional queen and
Elisabeth as follows: “She would have the naïve pride, the grace, the
passion, the courage, the elegance, and the sense of destiny found in
Empress Elisabeth of Austria.”2 Cocteau described his works as both
an attempt to retheatricalize the theater of the 1940s that he considered
to be too much under the influence of cinematic style, and to theatri-
calize the cinema lacking in actors truly worthy of the title “star.”3 The
1 Jean Cocteau, L’Aigle à deux têtes (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). All translations mine.
2 Cocteau, L’Aigle, 9.
3 Thomas Armbrecht has published a thorough examination of Cocteau’s evolv-
ing attitudes towards cinema and theater and how they influenced the devel-
opment of the play and subsequent film version of Cocteau’s text. Armbrecht
underscores the apparent antagonism between popular cinema and elitist
theater and the threat that Cocteau saw to the theater by a burgeoning new
form of spectacle, but he also proposes that cinema allowed in the end a rejuve-
nation of theater, and that ultimately both arts nurtured each other, especially
in Cocteau’s case. Armbrecht also analyses the meaning that cinematographic
techniques bring to the film version, and what the camera allows Cocteau to do
that the theater does not. See Thomas Armbrecht, “‘La Dixième Muse’ Meets
‘Un Monstre Sacré’: Theatricality and the Cinema in Jean Cocteau’s L’Aigle à
deux têtes,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 25, no. 1 (2007): 37–51.
302 Sissi’s World
play, which was written during the Nazi occupation of Paris during
World War II (although not published until three years later), was well
received by the public but was a critical disaster in an age when French
theater was dominated by existentialist tendencies.4 The film version
was both a critical and popular failure, probably due to its strange,
seemingly irreconcilable genre hybridity and to its proximity to the
release of Les Enfants terribles, a massive success for Cocteau in 1949
and filmed in a very different style.5 Claude Arnaud explains that Coc-
teau himself recognized the difficulty of presenting “a work written in
French, but conceived in German.”6 Although the French writer “had
always turned to myth to elevate himself far from reality,” the Nazis
“had made it difficult, for a time, to use this kind of drama, featuring
exceptional characters with vast powers.”7 Arnaud blames this under-
standable change in public taste for Cocteau’s suddenly falling “out of
fashion,”8 despite having been highly popular during the occupation.
Several scholars have engaged the disjointed nature of the film in
order to explain its lack of success.9 This paper will not appraise why
4 For the writing of L’Aigle à deux têtes during 1943, see Claude Arnaud, Jean Coc-
teau: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 685–6; Armbrecht pos-
its Cocteau’s sense of popular taste, in contrast to existentialism, as one reason
for the film’s critical failure. See Armbrecht, “Dixième Muse,” 41.
5 Rana El Gharbie remarks that the number of outside scenes is limited, with the
siege of the castle adding to the feeling of being trapped inside. See Rana El
Gharbie, “L’Adaptation cinématographique d’oeuvres théâtrales chez Jean Coc-
teau,” Études littéraires 453 (2014): 33. Francis Ramirez argues that every piece
of art (poetry, spectacle, etc.) is the transfiguration of the natural and the con-
struction of the monstrous and therefore the contrast between the naturalistic
outside scenes and the falseness of the acting style in the castle is in accord with
the film’s aesthetic style. See Francis Ramirez, “Les Comédiens terribles, éclats
de théâtre dans les films de Jean Cocteau,” in Le Théâtre à l’écran, ed. René Prédal
(Paris: Charles Corlet, 1999), 234.
6 Arnaud, Jean Cocteau, 734.
7 Arnaud, Jean Cocteau, 734.
8 Arnaud, Jean Cocteau, 734; Delphine Aebi writes of Cocteau’s risks as an openly
anti-fascist artist during the war. See Delphine Aebi, “1941: Une Année ‘terrible’
pour Jean Cocteau,” in Le Théâtre français des années noires: 1940–1944, ed. Jean-
Yves Guérin (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015).
9 Jeanne-Marie Clerc sees the film as a stepping stone for Cocteau from not know-
ing how to film his own work to a great improvement in Les Enfants terribles.
See Jeanne-Marie Clerc, “Jean Cocteau adaptateur de lui-même,” in Le Théâtre à
l’écran, ed. René Prédal (Paris: Charles Corlet, 1999), 90. For another perspective,
Danielle Chaperon argues against critics who accuse Cocteau of diluting the
drama of his tragedy by adding in subplots that were only hinted at in the play.
For Chaperon, it is the contrast in filming styles that makes the subplots believ-
able, since the queen is in favor of anarchy and the Archduchess imposes order.
See Danielle Chaperon, “Les Parents terribles et l’Aigle à deux têtes au cinéma:
Fauves en cage et aigles en liberté,” in Les Adaptations, ed. Serge Linarès (Caen:
Minaud, 2008), 141–5.
Cocteau’s Queen 303
the film failed; instead I will return to the question of genres, not to put
them in competition but to examine their workings within both the play
and the film. In particular, I will focus on three generic constraints, two
of which guide the plot of both the play and the film, and the third of
which shapes the perception of the queen as a cinematic figure. Firstly,
the queen’s own proclamations about spectacle reveal a mode of rep-
resentation that was specific to royal figures and implicated in the crea-
tion of their own legends. Their appearances in public take on theatrical
dimensions and employ heavily symbolic imagery in order to create a
consistent public presence that is both heroic and inscribed in a divine
order designed to guarantee their legitimacy. I will refer to these prac-
tices as royal spectacle, borrowing the term from Lawrence M. Bryant’s
work on late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century royal entries, a period
when communal rituals became more formally encoded into the type
of spectacle that would endure for centuries.10
The queen eventually plots her own royal entry into her capital city,
although it will be thwarted. However, at the beginning of the drama,
in what seems to be an attempt to erase herself from her family’s his-
tory, the queen rejects this mode of representation, preferring that of
classical tragedy, a narrative genre dependent on telling more than
showing. In the film version, the camera creates several moments of
cinematic spectacle—moments that linger on an image in order to acti-
vate the viewer’s gaze in contemplation of it—which both dramatizes
the plot’s transformation into film, and contains a number of overt ref-
erences to Sissi’s life that were absent from the play. In considering the
transition from theater to cinema, the spectacle that appears in Coc-
teau’s film corresponds to Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs’s conception
of tableau shots as cinematic spectacle, especially in the way that they
establish a painting-like tableau to arrest the viewer’s gaze to interro-
gate characters’ emotions and motivations.11 In addition, some of these
moments activate what Tom Brown calls the “historical gaze” in film,
in which a character is shown, through the use of cinematic spectacle,
to contemplate and understand her place in history.12 I propose there-
fore that these three aspects—royal spectacle, classical tragedy, and
cinematic spectacle—negotiate the play’s and, in a somewhat different
manner, the film’s relationship with its historical referents. The closing
10 See Lawrence M. Bryant, “From Communal Ritual to Royal Spectacle: Some

Observations on the Staging of Royal Entries, 1450–1600,” in French Ceremonial
Entries in the Sixteenth Century: Event, Image, Text, ed. Nicolas Russell and Hélène
Visentin, 207–46 (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007).
11 See Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, “The Fate of the Tableau in the Cinema,” in
Theater to Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 48–78.
12 See Tom Brown, “Spectacle/Gender/History: The Case of Gone with the Wind,”
Screen 49, no. 2 (2008): 157–78.
304 Sissi’s World
scene of the film marries all three, giving us a mythical rendering not
just of Cocteau’s fictional queen, but also of Sissi as cinematic spectacle.
L’Aigle à deux têtes is set in a fictitious Bavarian mountain kingdom
ruled by an archduchess, the mother of the country’s deceased King
Frederick. The queen, Frederick’s widow, has lived in mourning and
retirement for the ten years since his death at the hands of anarchists,
despite her mother-in-law’s wish that she return to public life. The
queen also refuses to show her face to anyone but her female compan-
ion and reader Édith de Berg. Depressed to the point of being suicidal,
she nonetheless cannot bring about her own end and longs for fate
to intervene. On the tenth anniversary of the king’s death, which the
queen spends in her castle at Krantz, a young anarchist-poet who bears
a striking resemblance to the king breaks into the grounds of the castle
intending to assassinate the queen. The anarchist Stanislas, injured and
trying to escape the police, scales the wall and enters the queen’s cham-
ber through an open window. He does not kill her; instead, he passes
out and is brought to his senses by the queen, who decides to shelter
him at the risk of scandal. She considers herself to be something of an
anarchist and, during their few days together, she and Stanislas appear
to fall in love and concoct a plot to reconquer her capital together, put
her back on her throne and depose the archduchess. The queen sub-
sequently changes her mind, and instead of acting with Stanislas, she
leaves him behind in Krantz. A disconsolate Stanislas takes his own
life with the slow-acting poison the queen had intended for her own
suicide. She discovers him, and before he dies convinces him that she
was never in love with him, but simply used him to advance her own
agenda. He stabs her, and as she is dying she tells him she really does
love him, but that without driving him to madness he would never
have chosen to kill her, which is what she claims she intended all along.
Rejecting Royal Spectacle

The expectation placed upon the queen by the archduchess and, by
extension, the rest of the royal court is that she will return to public life
after ten years of seclusion in order to be simply a symbolic figurehead.
The queen is only willing to return to the court in order to be an active
participant in the country’s governance, but Foëhn, the chief of police
speaking on behalf of the archduchess, explains, “What will we ask of
Her Majesty? To be an idol. To hide, beneath her splendor, the sordid
realities to which a woman of her stature will never bend. When the
queen is absent, the people can see them.”13 Ideally for those already
in power she would be a static, unchanging object to be revered and

paraded in public in order to exert control over the masses.14 Idols are
untouchable, sacred things with which no communication is possible, as
opposed to human beings with the possibility of living “sordid realities.”
As well as being static and unresponsive, idols can also be exotic things
from far-flung lands; the aristocratic queen appears foreign to her people,
the rustic inhabitants of the mountain. Stanislas saw the queen in this
manner even before their meeting, describing her as “a Caribbean idol.”15
When Foëhn interrogates Stanislas and learns of his plans to re-enter
the capital with the queen, he again conceives of events in terms of
visual spectacle, “But what purpose will this sensational journey serve
if it is nothing but a simple firework display?”16 Foëhn insinuates that
any actions undertaken by the queen can have no substantive effect
but can only capture the public’s attention momentarily. He under-
stands it is the perfectly assembled material trappings of the queen’s
appearance, the “splendor” of her clothing, jewels, emblems, horses,
carriages, etc., that the public needs to see. Royal spectacle is closely
related to theatrical spectacle—the arresting, awe-inducing display on
a stage—with the addition that royal figures appear not only as them-
selves but as a symbolic representation of their kingdom in order to
reaffirm the myth of royal legitimacy.17 The queen herself recognizes her
14 Michiels and Collard observe that the queen’s attempt to convert her life into art
is reminiscent of the Orpheus theme that runs throughout Cocteau’s work. See
Laura Michiels and Christophe Collard, “Double Exposures: On the Reciprocity
of Influence Between Tennessee Williams and Jean Cocteau,” Comparative Drama
47, no. 4 (2013): 509.
17 Ernst H. Kantorowicz traces the notion of royal physical presence in western
European monarchies back through the medieval era when theories were estab-
lished concerning the divine guarantee of the kingdom’s legitimacy through the
body of the king. Material objects such as the crown symbolized the power of
the monarchy, and the king functioned as a public head of a body politic. See
Ernst H. Kantorowitz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1997), 314–42 and 409–50. In the French and broader European contexts
beyond the Medieval Era, the use of temporary architecture during royal entries
into cities, especially in the sixteenth century, made a theatrical spectacle of the
cityscape, using the king’s body as the main character. The king would be fea-
tured in a series of tableaux that narrated his family connections to classical
gods. The presence of the king as he passed through each set piece completed
the spectacle. See Writing Royal Entries in Early Modern Europe, eds. M.C. Cano-
va-Green, J. Andrews, and M.F. Wagner (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). In the seven-
teenth century, the king’s participation in ballet at Versailles made him a direct
participant in court spectacle, and the position of the royal box in the theater
made him the symbol of divine authority directly on the stage. See Alan Sikes,
Representation and Identity from Versailles to the Present: The Performing Subject
(New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007), 23–56. These are just two of many exam-
ples of monarchic theatrical representation from the era that the queen evokes
with her references to classical theater.
306 Sissi’s World
ancestors’ art of appearing as representations: “What do you expect?

Our families worship art fanatically. As a result of writing mediocre
poetry and painting mediocre paintings, my father-in-law, my uncles,
and my cousins grew tired and changed tactic. They wanted to become
spectacle.”18 Having attempted to produce art in the form of poems and
paintings, they instead look to “become” an artform. Cocteau’s queen
describes the work of transforming human beings into legends. The
queen is not specific about what kind of spectacle her ancestors became;
what is clear, however, is the visual nature of the artform, the necessity
of it being gazed upon.
Elsewhere in the play, spectacle also comes to be used for a display
put on by nature, implying an event that again induces awe in the spec-
tator. The queen criticizes Édith de Berg’s choice to shut out a storm,
“Close the windows, pull the curtains, shut yourself away, hide behind
a wardrobe. Deprive yourself of this magnificent spectacle.”19 This use
of spectacle as a force of nature that can terrify (in this case terrifying
Édith), but that the queen embraces as life-giving, appears again in a
description of the queen herself. Félix de Willenstein, a duke in the
queen’s entourage, admits that he spied on the queen and saw her bare
face in its grief-stricken wonder, “She was suffering great pain, Édith. I
will never forget this spectacle. She was radiating daggers of light like
a Spanish painting of the Virgin Mary.”20 The queen again becomes the
spectacle, putting her beyond simple human existence and into the
realm of art. The monarchy here occupies a space somewhere between
the human and the superhuman, the real and the legendary.
The term spectacle also evokes negative connotations. Spectacle can
be a tasteless show that humiliates those on display. Stanislas fears the
spectacle that their lives would become if lived under the derisive gaze
of the court and the public, “Behind your back, this abominable frame of
mind poisons your residences. We would soon be a spectacle.”21 In addi-
tion, a spectacle can be a display of artifice that is intended to convince
an audience of its veracity, but that in the end only belies its insincerity.
The queen accuses Stanislas of just such a display, “How, I ask you,
could I ever place any confidence in a stranger who was betraying me
and putting on a spectacle in front of me? On what basis did you believe
me to be sincere, while you were double crossing me in front of my very
eyes?”22 In this sense, spectacle is linked too closely to another term
related to the world of theater and also tinged with falseness: comédie.

Édith believes both the queen and Félix are acting with intent to deceive
anyone watching. She accuses Félix of being in love with the queen,
employing the term comédie, “After a week you gave up all pretence
(comédie), and treated me like a rival, like a person whose perspicacity
was becoming an obstacle between you and the queen.”23
In addition, Édith accuses the queen of staging the dinner with the
ghost of the king as a means to deceive her and Félix and as a strategy
to engineer the introduction of Stanislas as reader, “This supper with
the king, this wish to be alone, everything about this worrisome night,
was an act comédie put on by Her Majesty.”24 She uses the word comédie
to accuse others of thwarting her own ambitions through deception.
The queen herself also uses this meaning of comédie to describe her own
actions vis-à-vis Stanislas, claiming that her love for him was a false-
hood, and that he fell for it: “I decided, decided, because I decide—I
decided to seduce you, to bewitch you, to conquer you. It’s funny! It all
worked wonderfully. It was a good act. (La comédie était bonne.) You
believed it all.”25 Spectacle and comédie belong to the world of the court
that the queen rejects, the machinations of players vying for power
and influence, tainted by scandal and gossip. The queen abandons her
ancestors’ embrace of spectacle to favor a different artform: tragedy.
Becoming a Tragedy, or Choosing Text Over Image

The inactive mode of spectacle designed for the queen by the court
would be visually arresting, but despite its associations with nature’s
awesome power, it is corrupted by falseness and base humiliation.
When the queen describes herself as an artform, it is with the desire
to be a tragedy in contrast to her male predecessors: “They wanted to
become spectacle. I, however, dream of becoming a tragedy, which isn’t
easy, you must admit. You can’t compose anything good in the midst of
tumult. So I shut myself away in my castles.”26
The queen’s predilection for narrative rather than image echoes the
divide between story and spectacle as theorized by numerous scholars
of theater and film; spectacle tends to arrest narrative, interrupting plot
to activate the gaze.27 The queen even covers her face in order not to

27 It is useful to remember Laura Mulvey’s expression “to-be-looked-at-ness” and
Steve Neale’s notion of spectacle as the means by which visibility itself is made
visible. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16,
no. 3 (1975): 6–18; Steve Neale, “Triumph of the Will: Notes on Documentary
and Spectacle,” Screen 20, no. 1 (1979): 63–86; Brewster and Jacobs, Theater to
Cinema, 48–78; Brown, “Spectacle/Gender/History,” 158–9.
308 Sissi’s World
become a spectacle when in public.28 The drive to become text, that is,
an entity embodying depth and truth, can also be glimpsed elsewhere
in the play. She imagines Foëhn musing that she thinks she is a poem,
“Yesterday in Krantz’s inn he must have smiled and said to himself,
‘The queen believes herself to be a poem.’ The murderer believes he is a
poet. How nice.”29 The queen revels in the poetic version of herself cre-
ated by Stanislas, claiming an accurate representation of herself in text,
“Don’t you know that queens tell lies? Remember your poems. In them
you described queens exactly as they are.”30 In addition, she forges a
past relationship between herself and Stanislas through imaginary let-
ters sent between them:
Stanislas: Do you know what it’s like to accumulate unanswered

letters, to insult a Caribbean idol or a cruel smile that mocks you?
The queen: I wrote you letters, too. My father made kites and let
me send messages on them.31
The link between them is made through text; fictions are created sepa-
rately by the pair, but they weave them together in their joint narrative.
The queen’s chambers are even implicitly compared to a theatrical
stage when Stanislas highlights the chasm between the queen and her
subjects, focusing on both her lack of thought for people of his class,
and her spatial segregation:
I came out of the shadow—a shadow you know nothing about,

which you can’t even imagine. No doubt you believe that my
existence begins at the window of Krantz’s castle. I didn’t exist
before that. […] Your chamber was warm, luxurious, suspended
in the void. You toyed [jouer] with grief there. And then I arrive.
Where on earth do you think I came from? From the darkness of
everything that is not you.32
Others can only gaze upon the lighted box from the darkness of the
stalls or off-stage. The double meaning of the verb jouer—to play, but
also to act in the drama—reinforces the notion of the queen’s quarters
and life being an artistic representation in a space away from her sub-
jects.
28 For a broader discussion of the queen’s use of the veil in both the play and film,
see Armbrecht, “‘La Dixième Muse’,” 41–2.
32 Cocteau, L’Aigle, 68–9.
In her book on tragedy in Cocteau’s œuvre, Irena Filipowska links

the repeated motif of tragedic plotlines in his works to the misfortunes
of his personal life and outlines the tragic events of L’Aigle à deux têtes.33
However, the queen does not simply wish to live a tragic story. Through
the verb “devenir” (“Moi, je rêve de devenir une tragédie”), she again
expresses the intent to embody an artform. In addition, she intimates
that she is authoring her own tragedy, yet writing the work while simul-
taneously living it implies creative control, and a prophetic knowledge
of the turn of events prior to their occurrence. A tragic plot depends
on the intervention of fate or the gods, an impossibility if the queen
is authoring events. She sees the embodiment of fate in the persona of
Stanislas and his dramatic entry, “Lightning hurled you into my room.
And you are my destiny. And this destiny pleases me.”34 This sponta-
neity does not last beyond that initial moment, and Stanislas, despite
adopting the pen-name Azraël (Angel of Death in the Abrahamic reli-
gions), reminds her of the tension between her need to control and her
desire to surrender to fate, 35
“You are not one of those that chance visits. You told me that
yourself. You dream of being a masterpiece, but a masterpiece
requires God to play a part. No. You decree, you order, you
manipulate, you construct, you cause what happens. And even
when you think you’re not doing it, you are.”
This destruction of the possibility of tragedy occurs despite other

indicators of the tragic mode; excerpts from Hamlet are used to fore-
shadow elements of the play’s plotline, and the queen adheres to the
seventeenth-century rules of bienséance (propriety), insisting on not
mentioning blood.36 In the French classical theater tradition that fol-
lows the conventions of the Ancient Greek theater, violence and blood
could not be shown on stage; a character’s death could be described
verbally but not acted out. In accord with the tradition, the queen has
33 See Irena Filipowska, Éléments tragiques dans le théâtre de Jean Cocteau (Poznań:
Adam Mickiewicz University, 1976), 7–24 and 113–23.
36 Michiels and Collard argue that L’Aigle à deux têtes enacts a series of doublings
and mirrorings: Frederick and Stanislas, Hamlet and Sissi, and so on. See
Michiels and Collard, “Double Exposures,” 514. Danielle Chaperon contrasts
classical theater with the cinema. There is a strict regulation in the (classical)
theater of what can and cannot be said or shown, where people can appear.
Cinema gives the filmmaker more choice over what to show and tell. The cam-
era is free to move, and the filmmaker can decide to show any location. What is
narrated on stage can be shown. See Chaperon, “Parents terribles,” 133–4.
310 Sissi’s World
chosen a mode of representation in which verbal description super-

sedes action. A pure transposition of the norms of classical tragedy in
a mid-twentieth-century, post-war play cannot hold; indeed Cocteau
states his intention of writing this play to explore the consequences of
abstract theatrical types becoming rounded human individuals. “The
true misfortune of these princes, who are superior to the role they play,
is that they are more ideas than beings. Moreover, it is quite common
for another idea to kill them. I therefore imagined putting on stage two
ideas which confront each other, and the obligation that they had to
take on bodily form.”37
The queen yearns to be killed in a tragic manner. When Stanislas
does not kill her, the sublime moment passes by, and life returns to its
banal ordinariness. Leaving him free to act does not work because he
falls in love with her. Destiny and the gods, in alignment with twen-
tieth-century ideas, do not exist. Danielle Chaperon argues that the
queen does not have any say in the outcome of her story. Rather, the
archduchess manipulates everything behind the scenes and replaces
the gods as the “machine infernale” behind every aspect of the queen’s
life.38 However, the queen does eventually succeed in engineering her
own fate, provoking Stanislas to the point of violent madness.
Cinematic Spectacle
The decision to produce a film version of the play poses numerous
questions about the generic differences between theater and cinema.
Notably for our purposes, the queen’s complex relationship with the
concept of spectacle must be rethought when presented in a medium
that is predominantly visual. The fixed position of the theater audi-
ence gives it a single angle and distance from which to view the stage,
whereas the film camera can show a scene from multiple angles and
distances.39 Whereas in the play Cocteau’s heroine can claim a degree
of control over her own representation on stage, this is not possible on
screen, where she is subject to the whims of the camera as it wanders
among the actors. As Cocteau himself explains, the camera becomes a
mediating character between the actors’ performances and the audi-
ence’s perception.40
The queen appears veiled in the beginning of the film, as in the play,
but only remains that way for the first thirteen minutes of the film. In
38 See Chaperon, “Parents terribles,” 145.
39 Chaperon, citing André Bazin, hails the liberation of the camera in cinema’s
specificity, freeing the viewer’s point of view, and therefore taking viewers out
of their seats. See Chaperon, “Parents terribles,” 132.
40 Jean Cocteau, Du Cinématographe (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 2003), 190.
contrast to the play, in which she unveils herself only part way through
Act II, she spends the majority of her screen time in the film unveiled.
When Félix ascends the forbidden staircase to spy on her from behind
a statue, she has uncovered her face and approaches the camera slowly,
coming down a long corridor. This scene is an addition to the play’s
original text, and as Chaperon observes, the film shows what the play
only describes.41 The scene is completely wordless, with the dramatic
effect dependent on the images alone. Facial expressions carry the
weight of the communication; the camera needs both the queen’s face
to transmit her pain to Félix and the viewer, as well as the reactions
demonstrated by Félix, whose point of view is occupied by the camera
when the viewer sees the queen.
Cocteau employs this kind of point of view shot in several places
throughout the film, and its represents just one example of how cine-
matic techniques present a different version of his protagonist.42 The
Queen’s approach from the far end of the corridor dramatizes her new
role as a film character. From a distance, she makes her way toward the
camera down the dark corridor, in a long white dress, carrying a lit can-
delabra and illuminated dramatically by the effect of lightning coming
through a window. No longer is she confined to a set distance from which
the theater audience cannot clearly perceive her facial expressions; from
the blur of the far end of the corridor she comes into perfect focus in a
medium close shot before we see a reverse shot of Félix. The fixed cam-
era shows the corridor for thirteen seconds, allowing ample time for the
viewer to contemplate the scene. Cocteau apocryphally called cinema a
modern type of writing in which light is the ink. After the visually busy
ballroom scenes with a bold mix of textures and shades of gray and
an ever-moving camera, the queen marks a stark white trace, growing
larger and brighter throughout the shot. Her ghostly appearance is in
contrast to the play version of this event narrated by Félix, in which the
queen is dressed in black. This, then, is a clear example of cinematic
tableau, in which a painting-like image is created on screen, and the
camera lingers on it to create a sense of wonder in the viewer.
The use of such a long corridor in this scene highlights the expan-
sive space available to the range of the camera. Not only can it move
anywhere, but it can also show a great depth of field. The theater might
paint such a perspective shot on to a backdrop, but an actor cannot enter
that space. Whereas the theater stage is a three-dimensional space with
limited depth, the film screen is a two-dimensional surface showing great
41 See Chaperon, “Parents terribles,” 133–4.

42 El Gharbie argues that it is in the use of camera placement and particularly
point-of-view shots that Cocteau’s text becomes cinematic. See El Gharbie,
“Adaptation cinématographique,” 36.
312 Sissi’s World
depths of three-dimensional space. Cocteau seems to revel in this aspect

of cinema in this film in several moments in which a door opens to reveal
a deep space behind it, whose depth is magnified by its architectural fea-
tures. As if to reinforce the point, at the end of the scene Cocteau shows
the queen walking dramatically back up the corridor, a shot this time last-
ing ten seconds, before she slams a door behind her. The effect can also
be reversed. When the queen rises from the dining table to take the ghost
of her dead husband by the hand, she approaches the life-size painting of
him and stands with her hand reaching out to his. The flat, two-dimen-
sional aspect of the cinematic image produces the illusion that the king
and queen are touching (Figure 12.1). The shot endures to hold the view-
er’s attention on this tableau made up of a tableau of the king and the
living figure of the queen. These three tableaux underscore the transposi-
tion of L’Aigle à deux têtes to the medium of film and force the queen into
the position of an object to be gazed upon, contrary to her stated wishes.
A similar shot is employed close to the end of the film, when the
queen has returned from riding to find her locket open and the poison
she had placed in it gone, taken by Stanislas. This time dressed in dark
military garb and set against a pale background in full daylight, she
hurries down a long corridor to find him. The length of the shot con-
trasts with her haste, creating dramatic tension between the urgency of
Figure 12.1 Cocteau, The Eagle Has Two Heads (film): Body and image:
the queen and king touch.
the situation and the length of time it will take her to reach him. These
corridor moments create high emotional drama through cinematic per-
spective, from the revelation of the queen’s state of mind in the first, to
the panic and realization of Stanislas’s imminent death in the second.
These scenes are bridged by another scene which plays grotesquely
with cinema’s ability to depict perspective. After Félix meets Stanislas
on his first morning in the castle, the interloper passes into the queen’s
chambers, which are overdetermined and cluttered with objects and
decoration. It makes for an unclear image even though he is in a jet-
black tuxedo. The camera then switches to the queen, dressed all in
black, holding a pistol and shooting at a target. The background is
bright and mostly white, setting her off in relief. It is in fact a model
street which resembles a painted backdrop in a theater until the queen
walks into it, and it takes on a different aspect. Unlike the corridor
scene, however, the proportions of the model in relation to the person
walking through it are strange: it is at once elongated compared to a
painted backdrop and truncated compared to a real street or the cor-
ridor. The perspective is wrong, and the queen towers over the min-
iature buildings, appearing to grow larger in relation to them even as
she walks away from the camera and therefore gets smaller on screen
(Figure 12.2). This tension between the eye’s expectation and what the
Figure 12.2 Cocteau, The Eagle Has Two Heads (film): Out of place: the
queen in the model town.
314 Sissi’s World
camera shows adds to the general unease that has already been estab-
lished throughout the first third of the film. The drama is heightened by
the presence of the pistol and the queen’s liberal use of it, and her place-
ment of it in Stanislas’s hand. It is further amplified cinematograph-
ically when the camera shows a close-up of the pistol placed next to
the book from which Stanislas is about to read. Viewers might expect
Stanislas to try and go through with the assassination attempt that had
failed the previous evening, but the scene has already prepared viewers
visually not to trust their expectations. The cinematic tableaux evoked
by long, high-contrast shots encourage the viewer to focus on visual
drama. In places, that visual drama competes with the dramatic dia-
log for dominance, with a high reliance on close-ups of the queen and
Stanislas to transmit emotions and reactions. The result is that the dia-
log loses a great deal of its impact. The queen’s carefully constructed
tragic scenario, in which narrative overrides visual spectacle, is undone
by the camera’s ability to create its own drama.
Cocteau’s writing in light is gloriously demonstrated when Édith
goes to tend to the queen during the ball. Félix has just described an
alarming, ghostly spectacle; Édith goes upstairs only to find her mis-
tress dressed and sparkling, in an outfit and headdress reminiscent
of Sissi in the famous portrait of her by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, in
which she wears a voluminous, off-the-shoulder, white gown with her
hair bedecked with star-shaped jewels.43 The camera lingers on her hair
decorations as they catch the light. Edwige Feuillère also gives the cam-
era plenty of opportunity to show their sparkle as the queen adopts
and holds a series of poses reminiscent of Sissi’s stance in the painting
(Figure 12.3). Moreover, when she is reading tarot cards, the camera
turns around her, the shot centered on her hair and the jewels. These
lingering shots turn Sissi herself into a cinematic spectacle, making an
overt visual reference to the historical figure although she had been
completely absent from any mention in the text of the play.
History and Film

Cocteau’s preface to the play makes his historical borrowing explicit,
although while he is inspired by Sissi, he claims the characters and the
plot are nonetheless his own inventions:
I had to invent the story, the place, the characters, and the heroes
capable of fooling everyone and suitable to pander to the public’s
preference for familiarity as opposed to knowledge, undoubtedly
because it takes less effort. Rémy de Gourmont’s wonderful
43 Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Kaiserin Elisabeth im Spitzenkleid. Kunsthistorisches

Museum, Vienna.
Figure 12.3 Cocteau, The Eagle Has Two Heads (film): The queen as Win-
terhalter’s Sisi.
study in Les Portraits littéraires gave me my queen’s character. She

would have the naive pride, the grace, the passion, the courage,
the elegance, and the sense of destiny found in Empress Elisabeth
of Austria. I even borrowed a few expressions that are attributed
to her.44
By Cocteau’s account here, his borrowings consist of Sissi’s abstract per-

sonality traits, and none of the events from her family’s life. However
various plot elements have strong affinities with incidents that hap-
pened to Sissi or her close family members. The assassination attempt
by a young anarchist mirrors Sissi’s own death at Lake Geneva. While
the queen is inspired by Sissi, her assassinated husband is based on
her cousin, Ludwig II of Bavaria. Ludwig died in mysterious circum-
stances; his death was ruled a suicide by drowning, but no water was
found in his lungs, and it occurred the day after he had been judged
mentally incompetent to rule. It is thought that he was killed by his
political enemies; mystery and doubt surround the circumstances of his
316 Sissi’s World
death to this day.45 Furthermore, the murder-suicide of two lovers is

reminiscent of the Mayerling affair, in which Sissi’s son, Crown Prince
Rudolph, shot his mistress and then himself.46 Cocteau compounds the
three stories of Ludwig, Sissi, and Rudolph into one in order to depict
the type of drama inherent in a great European royal family, merging
the threads in a way that skillfully weaves a tale that must be consid-
ered fictional.
Beyond basic plot points, there are further striking similarities
between the fictional queen and her historical counterpart. The queen’s
anti-conformism and mistrust of her subjects resemble Sissi’s, as does
her difficult relationship with her mother-in-law.47 Her treatment of the
memory of Ludwig II as described by Brigitte Hamann, is recogniz-
able in the queen’s as she “made an idol of the dead ‘eagle.’”48 Sissi
was convinced that Ludwig visited her as a ghost, setting the scene
for Stanislas being initially mistaken for Frederick.49 Sissi, approaching
fifty, would cover her face with a fan or an umbrella to avoid showing
her age.50 She retired to a secluded castle, the Hermes Villa, surrounded
by guarded walls.51 Hamann describes Ludwig trying to escape reality
into a fantasy world, while Ludwig and Sissi’s relationship “was the
intimacy of two fairy-tale characters who have left reality and ‘normal
people’ behind.”52 Cocteau’s predilection for fairy tales makes the royal
cousins ideal material for one of his plays. Hamann describes an Afri-
can servant being the only escort on trips that Ludwig and Sissi took
together, foreshadowing Tony, the queen’s African servant in Cocteau’s
play and film.53 Finally, Hamann writes of testimony by Prince Eulen-
berg, in which he described Sissi’s daily work on her trapeze.54 All of
these details permeate both the play and the film. The trapeze presents
an interesting case, since it does not appear physically in the play, but is
the subject of a complaint by the queen that the public hears false rum-
ors about her. Whereas in the play these rumors can be dismissed as
45 For an account of Ludwig II, see Katerina Von Burg, Ludwig II of Bavaria: The
Man and the Mystery (Swansea: Windsor Publications, 1989), 308–15. For specu-
lation about his death, see Connie Neumann, “Fresh Doubt About Suicide The-
ory: Was ‘Mad’ King Ludwig Murdered?” Spiegel Online, November 7, 2007. As
recently as 2007, new theories were being proposed about his demise.
46 Although they died from gunshot wounds, Sissi was originally told that they
took poison. Cocteau incorporates both methods into his text. See Brigitte
Hamann, The Reluctant Empress (New York: Knopf, 1986), 336–47.
47 Hamann, Reluctant Empress, 266.
49 Hamann, Reluctant Empress, 77–8.
51 Hamann, Reluctant Empress, 279–81.
52 Hamann, Reluctant Empress, 271 and 268.
ridiculous, in the film version the queen is seen swinging from a trapeze
twice. In the film she becomes the spectacle referred to in the play. The
film confirms those rumors to be true, revealing visually an unverifiable
textual reference from the play, and concurrently adding in a concrete
detail about Sissi’s life.
With the trapeze and the Winterhalter portrait, Cocteau’s film is
more suggestive of its historical origins than his play. Furthermore, the
filmmaker employs cinematic techniques that further demonstrate his-
tory’s transformation into fiction film. For example, the opening cred-
its appear over the vibrant image of a flag fluttering in a breeze. The
flag shows the two-headed eagle of the film’s title, which resembles the
emblem of the Austrian empire, and which becomes the symbol for the
fictional queen’s own reign with Stanislas. This historical marker takes
up the entire screen and is lit in such a way that stark patches of light
and shade flicker across the screen. The image of the flag resembles the
leader frames from old film stock. The superimposition of the historical
image over the film-like image of light and shade passing across the
surface of the screen makes the credits into a composite historical and
filmic introduction to what is a hybrid piece of work: a fictional narra-
tive with elements borrowed from a historical past. In effect, this shot
dramatizes history’s transformation into a fiction film. The length of
the credits keep this composite, dynamic tableau in front of the viewer
for several minutes, capturing the whole field of vision, insisting on the
spectator’s attention.
Immediately following the credits, an opening intertitle appears
superimposed on the same flag image. In it, Cocteau exhorts his audi-
ence to think of this film as a story and not history, despite what the
audience might remember: “The Eagle With Two Heads is not history. It is
a story, all parts of which were invented by the author. The characters
and the places only exist in his imagination. It is therefore important
not to confuse them with anything that the public might remember.”55
This statement, although on its surface appearing to claim pure fiction,
undermines that claim, firstly by appearing over an image that has its
origins in history. Secondly, the apophatic mentioning of history in
order to discard it invokes that history at a moment when it did not
need to be inserted, if this film is indeed pure fiction. In addition, the
audience’s memory, linked to its lived (historical) experience, is dis-
missed as unreliable. Events on which the script is based (Ludwig’s
death in 1886, Rudolph’s in 1889, and Sissi’s in 1898) occur between
forty-eight and sixty years prior to the publication of the play, and were
therefore relatively recent and still within living memory in the 1940s.
55 L’Aigle à deux têtes [film], directed by Jean Cocteau, France: La Société des films
Sirius, 2010 [1948].
318 Sissi’s World
Furthermore, an audience cannot have any memory of events that are

wholly created by an author. However, this statement also works to
remind the audience of what they remember of this history. Cocteau’s
intertitle highlights the transformation of history into filmic story for a
second time, and reinforces the idea that this film is a mise-en-abyme of
cinematic creation.
In the opening scene to the film, which does not exist in the play nor
is it narrated, the camera shows, from behind, three aristocratic figures
standing high on a mountain. As Armbrecht has stated, this choice of
shot frustrates the expectation of the cinematic view since it shows nei-
ther the faces of the characters nor the spectacular view from the top of
the mountain.56 The mountain is not only a vantage point from which to
survey the kingdom, but also a good place for echoes, to literally make
its material substance resonate with sound. Édith de Berg and Félix de
Willenstein shout their names into the void, which echoes them back.
The queen will not do likewise, attributing her refusal to partake in this
ritual to her fear that the void will echo back somebody else’s name.
The film here again alludes to the process of creating fiction out of fact.
Édith and Félix are not afraid to enunciate their names into the
world, which reflects their sound and therefore their historic impor-
tance back to them. They demonstrate an unshakeable faith in the per-
manence of history by appealing sonically to the physical location of
their families’ place in it. The queen disputes such a notion, observing
as they descend that “the mountains are moving,”57 refusing even their
physical permanence just as she had refused her own place in that land-
scape. The mountains do, in fact, move in the image since the camera
is moving, and therefore causing static objects to appear to move on
the screen. The queen both recognizes the danger to her memory of
history being told in fictionalized forms and describes cinema’s ability
to reshape space and time.
Tom Brown describes the historical gaze as a moment in which a
character gazes out on a landscape, the camera shows that gaze, and
it is implied that the character comprehends his or her place in history
in the same way that the viewer does.58 Here the queen eschews that
historical gaze both by refusing to participate in the ritual, but also by
covering her face. The viewer cannot penetrate the queen’s intentions
nor know in which direction she casts her eyes. If she does indeed take
in the sweep of history and her place in it, as Édith and Félix do, it is a
history that is only vaguely located in place and time and wholly bereft
56 Armbrecht details the way the opening mountain shot defies cinematic conven-
tion. See Armbrecht, “Dixième Muse,” 45.
57 L’Aigle (film).
58 Brown, “Spectacle/Gender/History,” 157–78.
of historical events. Indeed, the foundation of the queen’s character in

Sissi is extratextual to the play’s script, with its elaboration occurring in
Cocteau’s prefatory materials. The camera also refuses that gaze in its
placement behind the figures. This is, then, a fiction film which takes
history as its backdrop while refusing any of that history a role, except
for an out-of-context reference to place based on a play that also takes
history as its backdrop but relegates that history to a place where few
who experience the play will detect its function within the play. In addi-
tion, the protagonist rejects her place in the world and in her history,
refusing to become the royal spectacle that her ancestors strove to be,
and instead crafting a wholly fictional role for herself as a tragic heroine
doomed to die for a fatal flaw.
At two moments in the final third of the film, however, the queen
does reclaim her place in her family’s history. The view of the queen
at the top of the mountain is realized when she goes out to ride. On
the final morning, as Stanislas goes to meet with Foëhn in secret, two
mounted horses gallop across the lowlands and are shown riding up
the mountain. It is the queen and Tony. A high ridge comes into view
with the queen galloping along it. Her horse rears; it takes several steps
backwards, creating a tableau of her dominating the shot and the land-
scape, offering an anticipatory intertextual reference to Marischka’s
introduction of Sissi in the first film in his trilogy, Sissi (1955). Then
the camera shows a close-up of the queen in profile, laughing. Though
veiled, her joyous expression is clearly visible through the thin gauze.
The camera lingers on her as she says: “Pollux, you’re scared! You’re not
in love.”59 Then there is a reverse shot of her view down the mountain.
Tony joins her on the ridge, and they both turn to ride back down. The
camera does a sweeping pan shot to follow them, with a wide shot of
the mountain as they ride into the landscape. The queen on horseback
can finally contemplate her realm from the mountaintop without fear.
She reclaims her place in her dynastic landscape in preparation for her
return to her capital. Inevitably, her plan to seize control of her kingdom
becomes a history that might have been, one that is itself only a legend,
as it is planned and narrated, but never carried out.
The final scene sees the queen accepting the necessity of royal spec-
tacle as part of her public role. Dressed in full regalia, she mounts the
staircase to her balcony to inspect her troops. In order to inspire them
to follow her, she must appear before them wearing all the trappings
of her status. The camera also makes this moment into a clear use of
the historical gaze, as it both shows the impressive sight given by her
perspective of the troops below her, and then shows the reverse shot
of their view of her. The viewer comprehends both her survey of her
320 Sissi’s World
people and her people’s appreciation of her. Unbeknownst to them, she

has been stabbed by Stanislas and is also living out the tragic ending
that she had longed for. After she salutes, she stumbles, reaching for
Stanislas just as he falls backwards down the stairs, the poison finally
overtaking him. The high-angle camera shot additionally makes this
scene into a cinematic spectacle, showing a perspective that could not
be reproduced in the theater, and lingering on his body at the bottom
of the stairs.
Through the use of royal spectacle, Cocteau’s queen signals her
acceptance of her place in her kingdom’s history that she had so vehe-
mently refused at the beginning of the film. At the same time, the cam-
era’s creation of cinematic tableaux throughout the film reinscribes
Sissi’s story into a fiction that had all but erased her in the theater. The
final scene of the film finds a way to marry royal spectacle, the queen’s
chosen genre of tragedy, the historical gaze, and cinematic spectacle. It
thus forges a hybrid resolution out of various generic elements to create
a single concluding moment that is at once historical, legendary, theat-
rical, and cinematic.
Conclusion
Foëhn’s final words, “We are in the legend right to the end!”60 enact the
transformation of the murder-suicide scene from events just observed
by the viewer to events of legend, loosely based on history but uncon-
firmable because unobserved by anyone still alive. The closing state-
ment, on the other hand, narrated by an omniscient and anonymous
voiceover, returns once more to the theme of history: “In the eyes of the
police and history, the drama at Krantz remains an enigma. But love is
stronger than politics and everything happened as I said it did.”61 To
reposition the story at its conclusion in the realm of history seems to
contradict the opening intertitle about the purely fictitious nature of
Cocteau’s work, but the statement is spoken by the same person who
did voiceovers in the film itself. The film therefore places this narrated
text on the same diegetic level as the film’s story. While they open and
close the film, the two statements do not function in the same way. The
first takes the form of an intertitle for the viewer to read and discred-
its both official history and individual memory. However, it is not an
intertitle within the plot of the film itself; it exists as part of the opening
credits, placing it at the extra-diegetic level, outside the film’s plot. The
second is an oral statement at the end of the story, containing a hyper-
bolic truth claim in its final words: “everything happened as I said it
did.” The tone of the statement puts it almost in the realm of fairy tale,
Cocteau’s mode of choice. The history mentioned is the history of the

fictitious world. The storyteller claims narrative authority even in the
face of official history and individual memory. Cocteau’s opening and
closing messages about history may deny his queen’s origins, but
within his film he makes overt visual references to Sissi, turning his
film again into a lesson about not trusting one’s eyes. Cocteau clearly
challenges the viewer to say where history begins and fiction ends.
“Sissi” has a stronger presence in this film because of the material,
aesthetic, and cinematic choices made to present the queen’s image,
which does not make the film more historically “accurate” than the
play, but creates a new kind of legend: whereas Cocteau’s queen accepts
her role in the fictional world’s history, the historical figure of Sissi takes
her place in the realm of legendary cinematic spectacle.
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Fat, Thin, Sad: Victoria, Sissi,
Thirteen
Diana and the Fate of Wax
Queens
Kate Thomas
Elisabeth, Empress of Austria—Sissi—was born in 1837. That same

year, Victoria ascended to the English throne. Victoria was just eighteen,
and unmarried. To mark the coronation of the young queen, Elizabeth
Barrett published a poem called “Victoria’s Tears,” which appeared in
The Athenaeum. It is aptly titled, for the new queen weeps copiously
in every stanza.1 Barrett, herself only twenty-one when she wrote and
published this poem, figures Victoria sorrowing at her transition from
a “maiden” who could lean upon her mother’s breast to a monarch
who is beset by the clamor of national pageantry, overwhelmed by the
weight of a crown.2 In the final stanza, a “pierced Hand” offers Vic-
toria a heavenly crown, greater than any earthly accolade. The poem
proffers a helping hand to the girl-queen; that this hand collapses the
young woman’s inauguration as queen into her distant death and that
this hand is itself stigmatized, freezes the poem’s frame on the suffering
that being a queen will surely entail.
1 Writing about Elizabeth Barrett and her poems about the young Queen Victoria,
Dorothy Mermin notes, “tears serve a serious function” and are a mark of “sav-
ing sympathy.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), 68.
2 Memorializing a young queen’s coronation so promptly in the national press
(and Barrett did the same thing when Victoria married) is itself highly symbolic
because it is a poet laureate who marks national occasions in this way. When
Barrett’s refrain focuses on the lowering of a crown onto Victoria’s brows, she
is practicing what it might feel like to have the laurels of the poet laureateship
lowered onto hers. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was briefly considered for the
laureateship in 1850, but it was given to Tennyson and it would take over 150
years before a woman—Carol Ann Duffy—would be handed the honor.
324 Sissi’s World
In 1854, sixteen-year-old Sissi was thrust into her imperial role when
she married Emperor Franz Josef. All the accounts of this young wom-
an’s transition strike the same, sorrowing note. She wept the length of
the procession to her wedding in Vienna; she wept on her return to the
Imperial Palace; and, indeed, the poems she wrote on her honeymoon
testify to her acute unhappiness, specifically the loss of her freedom:
“Und Freiheit! Du, mir abgewandt!” (“And freedom! You, turned from
me!”), she mourned.3 When she first met her husband-to-be, at the age
of fifteen, she was dressed in mourning attire, and it was a costume that
set the scene for her married, imperial life; all biographers agree that
becoming an Empress unfolded a life of loss and grief. Sissi was reluc-
tant, lonely, depressed, tragic.4
Sissi mourned a bad marriage; Victoria mourned a good one. Brit-
ain’s queen was also famous for her grief, spending the last forty years
of her reign in deep, reclusive mourning for her beloved husband
Albert, who died in 1861.5 Her diaries testify to her sexual passion for
her husband and though—like Sissi—she abhorred being pregnant,
it was because—unlike Sissi—she hated how pregnancy interrupted
her erotic life. If their grief was differently allocated, the two queens
also had radically different physicalities; biographers tell us that Sissi
starved, exercised and tight-laced her waist down to 16 inches, whereas
by the 1870s, Victoria’s 48-inch waist made her 10 inches less around
than she was tall. Sissi’s form was anorectic and melancholic whereas
Victoria’s was zaftig and lusty. This article will, however, overlook these
seeming physical dissimilarities in order to show instead how their
embodiments and their affective lives were ruled by an insatiable cul-
tural desire to see an imperatrix waxing and waning both physically
and emotionally. Their bodies’ differences were, in fact, an index of
their self-sameness.
My method, of seeing both of these women’s bodies as essentially
the same as each other, or as exchangeable for each other, or as each oth-
er’s morphic Other, is undergirded by an essay that has acquired foun-
dational status in fat studies and, indeed, set fat studies into immediate
and lasting relationship with queer studies. Michael Moon and Eve
3 Dated May 8, 1854. Brigitte Hamann, The Reluctant Empress, trans. Ruth Hein
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 50–1.
4 Brigitte Hamann titles her biography The Reluctant Empress; Joan Haslip titles
hers The Lonely Empress: A Biography of Elizabeth of Austria (Cleveland: World
Publishing Company, 1965).
5 Nancy Armstrong argues that when Victoria retreated into mourning, “she
turned herself into a sentimental heroine who more than compensated in mass
public appeal for what she relinquished in terms of political authority.” “Mon-
archy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22,
no. 4 (2001): 495.
The Fate of Wax Queens 325
Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 1993 essay “Divinity” is written as a dialogue,

and as it progresses they theorize and enjoy the way in which the fat
woman and the gay man see themselves in each other. This delectation
of self-sameness across divides of gender, sexuality, and physical lus-
ciousness counterweights the way in which women, looking at women,
are taught to triangulate the gaze through an outside observer, and thus
turn identification into loathing and thence into self-harm: “When my
sister who is deliberately starving herself, under the real or imagined
gaze of some man or some other woman, looks in the mirror in the
morning and the body that she thinks she sees confronting her is—
mine.”6 We are familiar with this story of how female self-loathing is
kindled by reflection, if not from our own morning ablutions, then from
childhood, when we learn that the rage engendered by reflection is the
defining dysmorphia of queenhood. In “Snow White,” a jealous queen
bids her glass to reveal “the fairest of all,”7 and the moment the mir-
ror—functioning as the triangulating gaze of the public—produces the
face of a younger princess, the old queen is driven to homicidal mania.8
Sissi and Victoria did see themselves in one another. More, they shared
a position “under the real or imagined gaze” of a culture that also saw
them, saw their bodies, in a constant morphological transformation into
and out of one another. Neither queen wished to kill the other, but they
shared, in death, a fate determined by the insatiable public gaze. In the
fairy tale, the murdered Snow White spends years in “a transparent
coffin of glass made, so that she could be seen from all sides.”9 The
stepmother, attending Snow White’s wedding, becomes so stiff with
6 Michael Moon and Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, “Divinity: A Dossier A Performance

Piece A Little-Understood Emotion,” in Tendencies, ed. Eve Kosofky Sedgwick
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). For another theorization of how
the fat and thin body must be seen as ontologically identical, see Jana Evans
Braziel: “just like the anorexic or bulimic body, the corpulent body is a desiring
machine—a spatium in flux through which intensities flow, energies pass.” “Sex
and Fat Chics: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body,” in Bodies Out of Bounds,
ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001), 245. For a more literalist version of this argument, see the fore-
word to The Fat Studies Reader, in which Marilyn Wann argues “People all along
the weight spectrum may experience fat oppression. A young woman who
weighs eighty-seven pounds because of her anorexia knows something about
fat oppression.” Wann, foreword to The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther Rothblum
and Sondra Solovay (New York: New York University Press, 2009), xv.
7 Brothers Grimm, “Little Snow-White,” in Grimm’s Fairy Tales: Complete Edition,
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1944), 249.
8 Eric C. Brown points out that the genre of the fairy tale exploded in Britain
in the fifteen years following Victoria’s ascension to the throne. “The Influence
of Queen Victoria on England’s Literary Fairy Tale,” Marvels & Tales 13, no. 1
(1999): 36.
9 Brothers Grimm, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 256.
326 Sissi’s World
jealousy that she freezes in place “and could not stir” and is killed.10
That Snow White is brought to life from statue form, and that her step-
mother is brought to death, shows us not that they are different, but that
they are—as the mirror knew all along and loved to watch—the same
woman in different moments of change. This paper will ultimately con-
sider the tendency of queenhood to progress through reflection and
constant transformation to effigy.
Victoria and Sissi met on several occasions, and—at first, before Vic-
toria was widowed—Victoria felt great sympathy for “the beautiful,
fragile young Empress alone.”11 Within just one year of writing this,
Victoria would herself be alone, her husband dead. Indeed, the way
Victoria expresses her sympathy for the Empress emphasizes her phys-
ical receptivity to the Empress’s feelings—she “gave one a sad impres-
sion”12—and even their affective surrogacy for each other: “I feel so for
her.”13 Both women, one thin, one fat, would spend most of their reigns
sad, and I read both their plastic physicalities and their publicly change-
able emotional selves as symptoms of how the imperatrix is required to
simulate, to be an effigy for the consolidation and the dissolution of the
realm. In his 1921 biography of Victoria, Giles Lytton Strachey charac-
terized the aged queen as having an obsession “for fixity, for solidity.”14
She would organize and review, he claimed, the “multitudinous objects
which belonged to her” in which “she saw herself deliciously reflected
from a million facets.”15 But mirrors can turn against queens, Strachey
warns:
then came the dismaying thought—everything slips away,

crumbles, vanishes; Sèvres dinner-services get broken; even
golden basins go unaccountably astray; even one’s self, with
all the recollections and experiences that make up one’s being,
fluctuates, perishes, dissolves …16
Strachey’s vision for the queen begins with her well-fed (she is “deli-
ciously” reflected, surrounded by dinner services and bowls from which
she might sup) but ends in ellipses, with her (despite her hoarding and
10 Brothers Grimm, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 256, 258.

11 Victoria, in a letter to her daughter Vicky, November 17, 1860. She is describing
how she loaned the royal yacht to the ailing Empress, so that she might travel
to Madeira for her health. Queen Victoria, Dearest Child: Letters between Queen
Victoria and the Princess Royal, 1858–1861 (London: Evans Bros, 1964), 282.
12 Queen Victoria, Dearest Child, 289.
13 Queen Victoria, Dearest Child, 284.
14 Giles Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1921), 398.
15 Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria, 398–9.
16 Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria, 399.
her implied fatness) “dissolved.” “Dissolution” is a word that peppers

Queen Victoria’s letters and papers because it is the official term used
for the end of a seating of Parliament and it was also the thing Victoria
feared happening to her Empire.17 The female imperatrix’s fragility and
changeability, indeed, her interchangeability with other imperatrices,
makes her available as an archive and index of the being and non-be-
ing of the “rise, decline and fall,” the fatness, thinness, and sadness, of
empire itself.
Trumpeted for their beauty when they were crowned as teenaged
girls poised between “maiden” and “monarch,” Victoria and Sissi came
to their thrones when the means of discerning queenly beauty and
tracking its changes through mass reproduction of images became pos-
sible. The mass taste for representations of their beauty quickly became
insatiable. Across their lifetimes rapidly advancing visual cultures and
technologies found the female imperial body to be a rich media archive.
Victoria was appropriated by one of the publishing phenomena of the
1830s: the Books of Beauty. These literary annuals created, as John Plun-
kett describes it in Victoria: First Media Monarch, a cult of Victoria as
“Beauty personified.” New methods of steel-engraving were “exploited
in order to manufacture a tinseled allure.”18 They provided, in other
words, a “close-up” on Victoria’s loveliness, an intimacy that was, par-
adoxically, enabled by the massive circulation of her image.
That a queen could now be made both a more delineated and a more
disseminated object of fascination was clearly intriguing to Sissi, whose
own beauty was legendary. Not only obsessively occupied by manag-
ing and maintaining her looks, in the early 1860s Sissi started collect-
ing photographs, a hobby that formalized into the compilation of “an
album of beauties.” Sissi dispatched friends, relatives, and ambassadors
to collect photographs only of women and only of “pretty faces.” That
she most particularly sought photographs of “Oriental beauties … from
the world of Turkish harems”19 expresses the mutually constitutive rela-
tionship between the evolution of early photography and an evolving
specularization of the bodies of racially Othered women. Sissi’s album
allowed her—the tables turned—to do the seeing, the objectifying, the
categorizing.
17 For an example of Queen Victoria using the word “dissolution” to apply to the
fall of an Empire, see her letter to her uncle, the Belgian King, on March 29
1853. The Emperor of Russia “thinks the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire
very imminent.” Arthur Christopher Benson, M.A. and Viscount Esher, ed. The
Letters of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence Between the
Years 1837 and 1861, vol. 2, 1844–1853 (London: John Murray, 1908), 431.
18 John Plunkett, Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 80.
19 Hamann, The Reluctant Empress, 130.
328 Sissi’s World
More than a century on, another reluctant, tragic, anorectic princess

might help us understand how fully the physical and emotional work
of being a queen in the age of mechanical reproduction is about feeding
public hunger to see. She can also help us to understand that however
much we hunger to see an imperatrix, it is a hunger that is never sati-
ated. We want to see the female imperial in process, but she is therefore
never finished, and we are therefore never done viewing what quickly
becomes her undoing, her never-ending end. The pierced hand hov-
ers over Victoria’s coronation, connecting her queenly beginnings to
her death. Sissi meets her husband and her future as an empress while
she is clad in mourning clothes. And Britain’s Princess Diana, “white,
imperial and sacrificial,” as Rosi Braidotti describes her,20 also staged
herself and was staged in relationship to death and grief early in her
career as Princess. In 1987, thin as a reed and gloveless, she shook hands
with an AIDS patient in an act that remains one of her most famous.
“HIV does not make people dangerous to know,” she said, then went
on to dispense divine knowledge, figured through the imagery of
hands. “You can shake their hands and give them a hug. Heaven knows
they need it.” Diana became an icon, an inheritor of the cults and cul-
tures of female imperial iconicity established by Victoria’s and Sissi’s
generation. Diana Taylor theorizes that Diana’s physical self was so
overwhelmed by mass representational practices as to become “redun-
dant.”21 Becoming an international icon meant she was “disembodied
[…] Never ‘live.’”22 Is it any wonder, we might ask, that she suffered an
eating disorder—bulimia—whose binge–purge arrhythmia flings the
body between excess and deficit? Hyper-objectified, Diana ceased to
have an embodied self while her image was repeated, endlessly. But
what was it, exactly, that the paparazzi were chasing, year after year
until her final, devastating re-embodiment in the Paris tunnel where
she crashed into mortality? Diana is a useful figure for Braidotti’s theo-
rization of the “nomadic,” of a subjectivity that is always in the process
of becoming, because Diana “was a woman in full transformation.”23
Anachronistically virginal when she married, the media got to watch
as Diana lost that virginity, became a mother, an abandoned wife, an
adulteress, a divorcee and—in her final, fatal affair with Dodi Fayed
and a rumored pregnancy—even became fused with and productive of
non-whiteness. It was a bloodthirsty hunger for the representation of
20 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (New York: Columbia
21 Diana Taylor, “Downloading Grief,” in Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the
Performance of Grief, ed. Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg (London and
New York: Routledge, 1999), 205.
22 Taylor, “Downloading Grief,” 205.
23 Braidotti, Nomadic Theory, 44.
an imperatrix that seemed, at the time, new. But Diana’s relationship to

media attention, her resultant ephemeral embodiments that fluctuated
between fat, thin, and sad, and her constant “full transformation,” was
inherited directly from queenly foremothers.
A series of likenesses connect Diana and Sissi: both were famous
fashion plates; both suffered from eating disorders; both worked with
outcast populations and became known as “the queen of hearts”24; both
were hounded by the press; both died suddenly and violently. The cir-
cumstances of their deaths differed—Diana was fatally injured in a car
crash after being chased by paparazzi, and Sissi was stabbed to death
by an anarchist in Geneva—but in both cases, their deaths were imme-
diately understood to be consummations of a tragic beauty they had
spent their adult years inhabiting, and both struck a world hungry for
their image as tragedies of immortal proportions, expanding to occupy
monumental time-scapes.25 Mark Twain said that Sissi’s assassination
“will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from
now,”26 while Elton John claimed, of dead Diana, that “the stars spell
out your name” and, echoing Blake’s Christ who, in the poem “And did
those feet in ancient time,” supposedly visited Albion on a tourist trip:
“your footsteps will always fall here/along England’s greenest hills.”27
And Diana did, quite literally, follow in Sissi’s footsteps. Diana was the
daughter of the eighth Earl Spencer and grew up at Althorp, an estate
24 The Diana–Sissi likeness is developed by biographer Andrew Sinclair, whose

citations are shaky, but the portrait is nonetheless interesting as part of Sissi’s
mythology. In Death By Fame: A Life of Elisabeth, Empress of Austria (New York:
St Martin’s Press, 1998), Sinclair claims that Sissi was known as “the queen of
hearts,” and he also claims that Earl Spencer called the press that chased her
“you scum.” Sinclair, Death By Fame, 94 and 97, respectively.
25 The specificities of Sissi’s murder draw her into uncanny relation to Snow White.
It is said that after being stabbed by the anarchist, Sissi’s tight-lacing prevented
the wound from bleeding freely and the severity of the injury was therefore not
realized. In the brothers Grimm version of the fairy tale, the old Queen tries to
kill Snow White three times; in the first attempt she laces Snow White’s bodice
so tight that she cannot breathe, and Snow White falls into a dead faint.
26 Mark Twain, The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (Boston:
DaCapo Press, 1991), 563. This description of the Empress’s assassination comes
from a letter Twain wrote to his friend the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell. The death
gives Twain a sense that he is “living in the midst of world-history again” and
he yokes Sissi’s death with the duration of Victoria’s reign: “The Queen’s Jubilee
last year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police, and now this murder,”
563. Twain also wrote an essay called “The Memorable Assassination,” opining
that “The murder of an empress is the largest of all large events” and that “—
even the assassination of Caesar himself—could not electrify the world as this
murder has electrified it.” Twain, The Complete Essays, 563 and 537, respectively.
27 Bernie Taupin and Elton John, “Candle in the Wind ’97,” Metrolyrics. Available
at: http://www.metrolyrics.com/candle-in-the-wind-97-lyrics-elton-john.html
330 Sissi’s World
that Sissi had visited many times to indulge her great pleasure of hunt-
ing. Sissi was invited to the estate by Diana’s great-great-grandfather,
the fifth Earl Spencer, who became her good friend and protector. With
the Victorian Earl by her side, Sissi chased foxes at Althorp, and even
fended off the nineteenth-century version of the paparazzi. Projected
through estate and aristocratic lineage, the tragic twentieth-century
English princess seems like a hologram of the tragic nineteenth-century
Austrian Empress, or perhaps it is the other way around.
Barbara Cartland’s Sissi

To study the persistent ephemerality of Sissi, I turn first to a peculiarly
ephemeral and marginalized literary form: the romance. Sissi has been
reanimated in several “bodice-rippers,” but none is more interesting than
Barbara Cartland’s. Cartland is (in)famous for having been both the most
prolific author of all time—over 700 novels—and also the step-grand-
mother of Diana, Princess of Wales. One of Diana’s biographers, Tina
Brown, quotes Cartland about her fiction’s formative, or perhaps deform-
ative, influence on Diana: “The only books Diana ever read were mine,
and they weren’t awfully good for her.” Cartland wrote not only a novel
about Sissi, Stars in My Heart (1957), but also a lightly fictionalized biog-
raphy called The Private Life of Elizabeth Empress of Austria (1959).
Cartland’s biography of Sissi begins with a description of Sissi’s
mother, Ludovica, who had “gone to the altar weeping.”28 She had good
reason to weep, Cartland explains, since her husband Max was unfaith-
ful and irresponsible. But Cartland’s description of his carefree ways is
imbued with relish and romance. In contrast to his enduring, weeping
wife, Max “carouses” and “journeys”29 and takes up the zither.30 His
adventures produce “a long retinue of generously endowed illegitimate
children” who then “romp” about the ducal estates.31 Of his legitimate
offspring, Sissi is depicted as especially beloved. Born at Christmas,
with a tooth in her mouth like Napoleon, Cartland makes this the fairy
tale birth of a princess; Max has “a strange feeling that this child would
mean more to him than any other he had bred.”32
28 Barbara Cartland, The Private Life of Elizabeth, Empress of Austria (London: Muller,
1959), 9.
29 Cartland, The Private Life of Elizabeth, 10.
32 Cartland, The Private Life of Elizabeth, 14. Max’s fairy-tale feelings about his
daughter would express themselves in her own later-life self-fashioning as
Titania. Biographer Joan Haslip quotes Sissi’s verses in which she figures Franz
Joseph as Oberon and herself as Titania: “Please let me have my freedom dear/
Unto the fullest measure/I love to dance in the moonlight’s gleam/Why rob
me of that pleasure?” Haslip, The Lonely Princess, 274. Establishing the theme
It has become routine to ridicule Cartland, sight unseen, for pro-

ducing fiction that drives relentlessly towards happy marriages. “I
am far too snobbish to have read one,” writes Hillary Mantel of Cart-
land’s oeuvre, “but I assume they are stories in which a wedding takes
place and they all live happily ever after.”33 But marriage and its eti-
quettes are subject to stern critique in both Cartland’s biography and
Stars in My Heart. It is the wild and free Sissi that Cartland celebrates;
the unmarried Sissi is “unaffected,”34 but after marriage, “She was a
prisoner, a caged bird.”35 In Stars in My Heart, Sissi is approving of her
father’s sexual roving and she reassures her half-sister that illegitimacy
is nothing shocking: “Sometimes I cannot help thinking that love mat-
ters more than the ugliness and cruelty of a wedding ring forced on by
compulsion.”36 Passion—and attractiveness—emerge as Cartland’s key
values, while forced and even unhappy unions are repeatedly referred
to as tragic.
Cartland’s depiction of Sissi as a “caged bird” sticks close to Sissi’s
own avian imagery for her misery; around the time of her marriage she
had written a poem envying the swallows their “liberty” and out of all
her wedding gifts, it was a talking parrot that pleased her best.37 If only
she could fly with the birds, her poem pleaded, “How soon would I
forget all sorrow/Forget the old love and the new/And never fear a sad
tomorrow/Nor let the tears my cheeks bedew.”38 This is Sissi’s poetic
answer to Barrett Browning’s coronation elegy for Victoria: the tears of
the imperatrix would evaporate were it possible to take flight.
And flight is precisely what Cartland is able, through her novel, to
grant Sissi. Stars in My Heart’s plot centers on a cleverly deployed bed-
trick. The Empress runs into the unhappy Gisela, who is being tortured
by her evil stepmother, and divines—in part from their likeness to each
of Sissi-as-fairy-princess, Haslip earlier cites a diary entry from Sissi’s lady-

in-waiting, Marie Festetics: “She seems to me like a child in a fairytale.” And
this fairytale, Festetics observes, is one in which good fairies give this child
everything, but one bad fairy curses it all, ensuring that “your beauty will bring
you nothing but sorrow.” Haslip, The Lonely Princess, 249. When Sissi’s daughter
Gisela married, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream was chosen for the gala perfor-
mance. Sinclair, Death by Fame, 73. Victoria, too, was hailed as Titania by Prime
Minister Benjamin Disraeli and others. See Brown, “The Influence of Queen Vic-
toria on England’s Literary Fairy Tale.”
33 Hilary Mantel, “Royal Bodies,” London Review of Books 35, no. 4 (February 21,
2013): 3.
34 Cartland, The Private Life of Elizabeth, 52 and 63.
36 Barbara Cartland, Stars in My Heart (London: Hutchinson & Company, 1957),
134.
37 Haslip, The Lonely Empress, 52 and 61.
38 Haslip, The Lonely Empress, 52.
332 Sissi’s World
other—that they are half-sisters.39 To spring Gisela free from the dispos-
sessions imposed on her by her evil stepmother, and to spring herself
free from a tiresome royal duty, Sissi sends Gisela to impersonate her on
a courtesy visit to old Lord Quenby. Gisela gets a much needed, if tem-
porary, home, and Sissi’s beloved hunting can continue uninterrupted.
The mood of the plot fits Sissi’s real-life exasperation with royal social
duties. Cartland’s Gisela-as-Sissi turns up to find that old Lord Quenby
is dead, and she is instead the guest of his young and compelling heir.
The romance of the novel, then, takes place between two changelings.
Cartland can set Sissi free from the lovelessness of her own marriage by
giving Sissi a proxy for herself, a half-sister who is also a love-child. The
tragedy of Sissi’s marriage can be rewritten as romance, but only if Sissi
is not herself but instead an illegitimate and fairy-tale version of herself,
a nearly identical twin.
If Cartland was somewhat rueful that her fiction about happy aristo-
cratic marriages not only could not save her step-granddaughter Diana,
but might even have contributed to Diana’s romantic misery, Cartland’s
Sissi books reveal a desire to save the young Empress of Austria from her
fate. This desire is manifested in one of the most glaring fictionalizations
of the biography. It is well established that Sissi met Franz in a court set-
ting, but in The Private Life, Cartland fashions a rustic half-encounter in
which Sissi has not only thrown off her royal trappings but has done so
in order to save a young animal from the machineries of royalty. Sissi’s
future husband, Franz Joseph, is traveling in a coach when he spots
a young girl running madly to catch a kid which had wandered

away from its dam among a flock of goats browsing on the stubble
of a recently cut hayfield. The little animal was gamboling this
way and that and was within a few yards of the road. The girl
was obviously afraid that it would be run over by the procession
of coaches.40
Why does Cartland invent this scene?41 It displays Sissi being careless
of her royalty and careful of those oppressed by it. Glimpsed through
39 Cartland’s plot device, making Gisela Sissi’s half-sister, was perhaps inspired
by Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen’s sensational, much-publicized “solution” to the
mystery of why Rudolph, Sissi’s son and only heir, killed himself and his preg-
nant actress lover, Mary Vetsera. In Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen, The Martyrdom of
an Empress (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899), Cunliffe-Owen claimed that
Rudolph had discovered that he and Mary were half-siblings and their affair
was thus incestuous.
40 Cartland, The Private Life of Elizabeth, 28–9.
41 This vignette is, of course, reminiscent of the famous scene in Marischka’s 1955
Sissi film in which Sissi dresses as a commoner and goes hunting with the Emperor
Franz Joseph, naughtily scaring away a deer so that it will not be killed. Likewise,
the frame of a moving coach window, it is a snapshot of soon-to-be-ex-

tinguished naturalness and freedom. On her way to join a regimented
court life that would remove her first-born baby from her breast, Sissi is
granted by Cartland a last moment of inhabiting a compassionate and
animal-self. “An hour later … the Emperor saw the little goat girl again.
She was wearing a fresh, white dress with a blue sash and her long
flowing hair had been tied up with a ribbon.”42 Cartland’s biographi-
cal invention focuses on how Sissi’s free-footedness is, like her “long
flowing hair,” about to be bound. Cartland herself describes the court
etiquette training towards which Sissi was headed as a “strict discipline,
almost cruel in its intensity,”43 and this is something Cartland blames for
extinguishing the joy of love that the young girl might otherwise have
had for Franz; it “nearly banished the natural feelings of excitement.”44
Her term “banish” belongs to the lexicon of the fairy tale, applied to
subjects excluded from kingdoms, but here Sissi is being exiled from her
own feelings. Ruination of nature is something Cartland will spotlight
throughout the biography—noting, for example, that the steamer that
conveyed Sissi to her wedding was decked in thousands of roses that
wilted and blackened from the soot.45 As if a rose herself, pageantry and
the machinery of mass reproduction will be the death of Sissi. These
conveyances—the goat-slaying coaches and the rose-wilting steam-
ship—ferry Sissi from a life of innocence and relative anonymity to one
of domineering iconicity; “Her likeness,” Cartland notes, “was soon to
be found in every hut and home in the whole Empire.”46 No longer a
chaser of goats, Sissi is now herself pursued and pinned down.
The idea of a “likeness” is compelling to Cartland. Not only does
she invent a lookalike for Sissi in Stars in My Heart, which allows Sissi
Sissi is the only person from whom a wounded fawn will accept milk. Marischka’s
film was based on Marie Blank-Eismann’s 2-volume German novel of the same
name that appeared in 1952. It is not clear whether Cartland was aware of either
the German-language novel or the film when she wrote her biography. Another
parallel is to be found in Henri de Weindel’s biography of Franz Joseph, in which
de Weindel portrays the couple meeting when Elizabeth’s puppy bounds out of
the woods and charges into Franz Joseph’s legs. Henri de Weindl, The Real Fran-
cis-Joseph: The Private Life of the Emperor of Austria (New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1909), 17. The identification of Sissi with young animals is also found
in the anonymously authored biography The Martyrdom of an Empress, in which
the biographer—now known to be novelist and newspaper columnist Margue-
rite Cunliffe-Owen—describes Sissi running about “like a young fawn.” Cun-
liffe-Owen, The Martyrdom of an Empress, 7. Cartland almost certainly drew heavily
on Cunliffe-Owen’s memoir for her own biography.
42 Cartland, The Private Life of Elizabeth, 29–30.
334 Sissi’s World
herself to effectively walk out of her misery and into happiness, but this
plot is most definitely fueled by the idea that being a pin-up girl for
Empire is enervating. So many versions of this Empress will be dissem-
inated and framed and pinned to walls, that she will lose her version of
herself. This mass of images will weaken her self-sovereignty. It is not
only Cartland who perceived the enervating effect of having become
a mediated monarch, but Sissi herself was surely aware of the fact.
Andrew Sinclair observes that Sissi was “perhaps the first royal woman
to be stalked,”47 and certainly she endured a nineteenth-century version
of the paparazzi. Sissi and commercial photography practically shared
a birth year and she hated this new medium.48 She avoided having her
photo taken by hiding behind a leather fan and she even refused to
have chest x-rays taken, saying, “I greatly dislike being photographed.
For every time I have had a photograph taken, it has brought me bad
luck.”49 Superstitiously averse to being seen, or seen through, Sissi
shielded herself with animal skin, in the form of a leather fan, and a
leather corset.50 Why leather? The fan, at least, did not need to be of
this material to do its job of blocking her face from the photographers’
view.51 But leather is the skin of an other: another body, another species,
another victim.52 To protect herself from the penetrating rays of visual
technologies, which would turn her into yet another image of herself,
Sissi instrumentalized another body and made it her defender.
Sissi’s fear of having her likeness taken was underpinned not by a
naïveté regarding photography and its power, but rather the opposite. Just
as Diana would be both hounded by the press, and also savvy about how
to manipulate it, Sissi too could wield images in her defense. At the close
of the Vienna exhibition of 1873, Sissi was given the “Cairo House” that
had been built in the Egyptian section of the Prater by the Khedive, Ismail
Pasha. This gift included a young boy named Mahmoud, who had been
47 Sinclair, Death By Fame, 169.

48 The year 1839, two years after Sissi was born, is generally accepted to be the
birth year of commercial photography.
49 Sinclair, Death By Fame, 63 and 171.
50 Photography and x-rays were not the only visual technologies that Sissi appar-
ently feared. In Cunliffe-Owen, The Martyrdom of an Empress, 3, Sissi is quoted
as feeling “continually under a microscope” like “some extraordinary insect cre-
ated for the malicious investigations and observations of the public.”
51 Leather is a material with qualities of impermeability, and being in the public
eye, being female in the public eye, places one in a complex tableaux of being
seen and not seen. As Eve Kosofky Sedwick observes, “What can a celebrity
body be if not opaque? And yet what if the whole point of celebrity is the spec-
tacle of people forced to tell transparent lies in public?” Eve Kosofky Sedgwick,
Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 227.
52 “There is something extremely familiar and almost self-evident about these pro-
cesses of transformation of the self through an other who triggers processes of
metamorphosis of the self.” Braidotti, Nomadic Theory, 164.
on display with the house. Sissi took the enslaved boy into her household,
and was reputedly so fond of him that she nursed him through a long
illness and “made him a playmate in the games of the little Archduchess
Marie-Valerie.”53 When it was discovered that Sissi allowed Mahmoud
to play with her daughter, Sissi was vilified. Sissi responded to the Aus-
trians’ outrage by “having the two children—the white and the black,
the imperial princess and the slave boy—photographed together, arm in
arm.”54 She then “further permitted the photographer to display the pic-
ture in his window and to sell copies to the print-dealers in the Austrian
capital.” The slave who had been on display in an exhibition then had his
image put in a shop window and reproduced most spectacularly, to both
amplify and mock the offence that his blackness had already given.55 And
what of Marie-Valerie? In the portrait, Sissi places her daughter, a white
child who is a princess, in companionship with a black child who is Sis-
si’s slave. On the surface, the portrait stages racial consanguinity as inno-
cence—children who could not be more far apart are made close, made
the same, through play. But play is dangerous and, secretly, this was a
portrait of princesses in peril. Sissi herself feared the penetrating gaze of
the camera. But she offered her daughter (who was, of course, a stand-in
for herself) up to its baleful eye. The enslaved boy beside the princess was
a yardstick of racial and social difference, to be sure, but he was also in
the photograph as a symbol of the fate of princesses in general. He would
have made visible their subjection—to the camera, to proliferation, to dis-
semination, to sale, to the fate of birth. It was a complex gesture, in which
Sissi yet again protected her own body through the use of deputees. Both
children were of Sissi and other than Sissi—one enslaved to her, one her
birth-child, and both were therefore projections of her. And like a portrait
with the eyes cut out, it was the hidden Sissi who looked back through
this photograph, staring down her critics. The shocking power of this
counter-representation and counter-gaze was such that an “‘unpleasant
caricature’ of the photograph appeared, which threw the Emperor into
such a rage that he had the parody seized and the original picture with-
drawn from shop-windows.”56 It was a suppression that lasts to this day;
both the photograph and the caricatures are lost.
That Mahmoud had been part of an Egyptian display, and that he
is then photographed alongside Sissi’s daughter, is particularly appo-
site. His story and the production of the photograph with Marie-Valerie
was a culmination of what we might call Sissi’s instrumentalization of
racialized representation to combat the camera’s power to dissolve and
53 Weindel, The Real Francis-Joseph, 196.

54 Cunliffe-Owen, Martyrdom, 100, also reports that Sissi called Mahmoud mein
kleiner schwarzer Käfer (my little black beetle).
336 Sissi’s World
disseminate her own (white) self-image. In Photography’s Orientalism, Ali

Behdad and Luke Gartlan describe the Middle East as a “crucial site for
the early practice of photography.”57 Having geographically situated the
formation of photography, Behdad and Gartlan are yet more specific:
“No other figure was as frequent a topic in Orientalist photograph as
the Oriental woman […] the most widely collected images by tourists
to Algeria and Egypt were those of the femme arabe.”58 Harem scenes
were most popular. And harem scenes produced for the commercial
Orientalist market would commonly show a veiled, but partially naked
woman.59 Sissi’s particular object of fascination, then, the Orientalized
female body, was the ur-scene, the ground zero, for specularizing the
female body more generally. It teaches us that to be seen is to be poised
between complete revelation (nakedness) and incomplete concealment
(the veil). Writing on the colonial harem, Malek Alloula theorizes the veil
as a rebuff to scopic desire, a disappointment of the photographer and
a kind of blindness, a “speck on the eye of the photographer and on his
viewfinder.”60 Sissi’s photo album of female beauty therefore fulfilled
two important fantasy functions for her; it transferred the photographic
gaze from her own body to racially othered proxy bodies, and it also
catalogued the failure of the medium to fully capture the female body.
If we return to Cartland’s made-up goat scene, we see that Sissi,
repeatedly referred to as a “girl” and a “young girl,” is saving a “kid.”
The metaphor at work here, and the tautology, point to the same thing:
Sissi is trying to save herself from the “procession” of royal machinery.
The “little goat girl” that turns up in court is a fairy-tale figure that is as
a much goat as she is girl. In her childhood, Sissi was a “tomboy,”61 who
rode “not in the usual stilted manner of ladies taking the air on a safe
and sleepy old mare, but on skittish ponies accustomed to clambering
sure-footed over the rocky ground and galloping full out on the flat.”62
Marriage and induction into royalty would turn Sissi into a caged ani-
mal. Sewn into her leather and whalebone corsets, animals—or their
remnants—would even become the instruments of her caging. Even
her killer had to awkwardly contort himself to peer under the empress’
shielding parasol, with its animal physicality of protective ribs, to be
sure of her identity before stabbing her. Far from the vitality of romping
on skittish ponies, the literary representations of Sissi’s adult physicality
57 Ali Behad and Luke Gartlan, eds. Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colo-
nial Representation (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), 1.
58 Behad and Gartlan, Photography’s Orientalism, 27–8.
59 Behad and Gartlan, Photography’s Orientalism, 94–5.
60 Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 7.
62 Cartland,The Private Life of Elizabeth, 15.
became morbid; emaciated, always sick, always sorrowful. Sissi’s biog-

raphers agree: she died long before she was assassinated.
One such biographer, Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen, frames her biog-
raphy, The Martyrdom of an Empress (1899), as both elegy and revenge.
Refuting Austrian press pieces that had appeared under titles like “The
Misjudged Empress,” “I cannot help feeling,” she writes, “the bitter-
ness of these post-mortem retractions.”63 She goes on to imagine corpses
“lying under the sod of our cemeteries, or beneath the flag-stones of
gorgeous mausoleums” listening to hypocritical speeches of those who
reviled them in life, at which “they might possibly indulge in a cadaver-
ous grin.”64 Sissi is, for Cunliffe-Owen, a martyr. After death she joined
those incarcerated—but grimly sentient—under sod and stone, and in
life too she had been tragically trapped: she had been buried alive.
To thrust home this point, Cunliffe-Owen recounts the notorious
case of a young nun named Sister Barbara who had been walled up
by an evil abbess for the sin of wanting to elope. Cunliffe-Owen claims
to have met the rescued, but deranged, young woman and to have
brought Sister Barbara’s plight to the attention of Sissi. Sissi, she writes,
was so affected by the tale that she “frequently sent flowers to the poor,
forlorn creature, and also some pretty and valuable singing birds, since
birds and flowers alone had retained the power of awakening a ray of
feeling in her dimmed soul.”65
The parallel between Sissi and Sister Barbara is thuddingly clear:
both knew what it was to be walled up. And Cunliffe-Owen, who her-
self was exiled, dispossessed and wrote anonymously, spots the mise-
en-abyme in the tale: the birds sent to Sister Barbara are “imprisoned
songsters.”66 Sissi’s alikeness to the caged bird is an example of what
Kathryn Bond-Stockton has called the “animal interval”; a means
through which a queer child can identify with an animal, thus “con-
founding her parents and her future.”67 Sissi certainly wished to con-
found if not her parents, then her step-parents, and the future imagined
for her by Austria’s imperial class. And she also identified powerfully
with animals. Cunliffe-Owen draws out the animalism of the goat-girl
Sissi imagined by Cartland; she writes of Sissi’s “extraordinary, almost
hypnotic, influence” over horses68 and remembers that Sissi “would
step out of the path she followed to avoid crushing a beetle or an ugly
63 Cunliffe-Owen, The Martyrdom of an Empress, 105–6.

64 Cunliffe-Owen, The Martyrdom of an Empress, 106.
67 Kathryn Bond-Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth
Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 90.
338 Sissi’s World
caterpillar crawling on the ground.”69 Once again, Sissi is portrayed

as saving the life of poor, lowly creatures, at the same time that her
own health and vitality is waning: “The face which the young Empress
raised towards her had lost in a few hours all its childish bloom: it was
the pale, haggard, drawn countenance of a woman who had left behind
her all the careless joys of youth.”70 Cunliffe-Owen’s depiction of Sis-
si’s descent into ill health finds a counterpart in an assessment of the
effects of marriage on women that was made by—surprisingly—Queen
Victoria. Writing to her daughter Vicky in May 1858, Queen Victoria
observed, “I think people really marry far too much; it is such a lottery
after all, and for a poor woman a very doubtful happiness.” She expands
on her theme: “the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s
slave. That always sticks in my throat. When I think of a merry, happy,
free young girl—and look at the ailing, aching state a young wife is gen-
erally doomed to—which you can’t deny is the penalty of marriage.”71
Victoria’s “ailing” and “aching” match Cunliffe-Owen’s “pale, haggard
and drawn”: both depict marriage as sickness. Victoria’s lines are par-
ticularly striking given not only that she was herself famously happy in
her marriage, but that the daughter to whom she is writing was a newly
wed. We might remember, however, that Victoria had expressed com-
passion for Sissi’s suffering and had sent “the beautiful, fragile young
Empress”72 her royal yacht for recuperation—and perhaps even rescue
from death. “May it not be too late,” Victoria fervently hoped.73 Victoria
and Sissi were, in some regards, very unalike. But the spectacle of the
imperial female body imperiled by marriage produced, for Victoria, a
way of reaching out across national and political divides, to touch and
be touched by Sissi’s condition.
Thomas Hardy’s Sissi

Another British Victorian was moved by a sense of closeness to Sissi-in-
death. In his largely self-authored and posthumously published biog-
raphy, Thomas Hardy recalled being ill in Geneva, lying in bed in the
Hôtel de la Paix. It was the summer of 1897. He could hear a fountain
outside his window, and “It was the fountain beside which the Austrian
Empress was murdered shortly after.”74 The passage then continues by
recalling that he had nursed a youthful passion for Sissi, and she had
been something of an early literary muse for him:

71 Hibbert, Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals, 105.
72 Sinclair, Death by Fame, 27.
73 Sinclair, Death by Fame, 27.
74 Florence Emily Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy 1892–1928 (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 70. First published in 1930.
His accidental nearness in time and place to the spot of her doom
moved him much when he heard of it, since thereby hung a tale.
She was a woman whose beauty, as shown in her portraits, had
attracted him greatly in his youthful years, and had inspired
some of his early verses, the same romantic passion having
also produced the outline of a novel upon her, which he never
developed.75
The phrase “thereby hung a tale” seems out of proportion. The tale
would, it seems, simply be that of a young man of no means or social
standing who fell in love with the image of a beautiful Empress he
would never meet. If it is a tale, there is no real punchline; the paths
of this downtown boy and an uptown girl would cross only in that he
slept somewhere near the place where she would die. But of course this
is the tale that Hardy would write out again and again across the course
of his literary career; impossible or ephemeral love for an out-of-reach
woman, glimpsed only in passing, or better still, seen not in person but
through portraiture. In Jude the Obscure (1894/5), Hardy showcases a
photograph that functions as a proxy for a beloved. “How he wished he
had that pretty portrait of her!”; and so Jude sends for the photograph
of Sue Bridehead.76 Set upon his mantel, Jude kisses the photographic
image of Sue before he ever meets the woman herself. Hardy’s erotic
imagination is ignited by visual representation. He falls in love not with
women, but with, to use his own title from his “Poetical Matter” Note-
book, “Women seen.”77
Many images of Sissi were in circulation during Hardy’s youth. He
could have seen any number of them printed in the periodical press,
but he would certainly have seen a portrait of Sissi at the 1862 Interna-
tional Exhibition at South Kensington.78 It was Hardy’s first summer in
London and he spent much time at the Exhibition, particularly with the
paintings.79 Franz Schrotzberg’s highly romantic portrait of a soft-fo-
cused, lacy-mantled Sissi was displayed in the Exhibition, and one peri-
odical, John Bull, observed: “The portrait of the Empress of Austria will
75 Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy 1892–1928, 70.

76 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 69.
77 “Women seen” refers either to a poem never written or (more likely) to a
sequence of poems. Michael Millgate notes Hardy’s “romantic readiness to fall
immediately, if temporarily, in love with women glimpsed in the street, in rail-
way carriages, on the tops of omnibuses, or indeed in any public place” and
quotes the “Women seen” suggestion for a poem from his “Poetical Matter” Note-
book. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Oxford, UK: Oxford
78 This exhibition was a successor to the Great Exhibition of 1851, and one that laid
the ground for the establishment of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
79 Millgate, Thomas Hardy, 76.
340 Sissi’s World
excite attention for her beauty.”80 Blackwood’s went yet further, “With
Schrotzberg’s portrait of the Empress of Austria all the world’s in
love.”81
What is the strange number game, the demographics of passion in
such a formulation? All the world loves one woman. A beautiful imper-
atrix can be the one for the many. For Hardy, Sissi plays this role, but only
temporarily. She soon joins the stream of young women with whom he
fell in love, and what comes of Hardy’s infatuations is the production
of poetry and fiction; these romantic fixations stimulated him to write.
His (auto)biographical account of his passion for Sissi is as much about
a young man becoming an author as it is about Sissi, or all the other
out-of-reach women for whom she stands.
Sissi was not only the woman Hardy never met, she was the subject
of a novel he never wrote; let us recall that he “produced the outline of
a novel upon her, which he never developed.” When Hardy refers to a
tale that hangs, it is a tale that never quite comes to be. Hardy had used
the same exact phrase, “thereby hung a tale,” in his short story “An
Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress,” which he wrote in the spring of
1878. The schoolmaster protagonist Egbert studies and strives in pur-
suit of fame and the Squire’s daughter Geraldine. Cultivating opinions
about painters, Egbert holds that “Romney was greater than Reynolds
because Lady Hamilton had been his model, and thereby hung a tale.”82
Once again the phrase is attached to infatuation with a beautiful muse;
Lady Hamilton was Romney’s muse and infatuation, just as Sissi had
been Hardy’s. Portraiture provides an intimacy with a woman who can
never be attained, and this out-of-reachness of the woman is, for Hardy,
a way of talking about how stories can also slip from one’s grasp. Hardy
wrote “An Indiscretion” in an attempt to reconstruct a novel that he had
lost. This lost novel was Hardy’s first. Written in 1867, it was titled “The
Poor Man and the Lady,” and it was rejected by publishers for being, as
Hardy puts it, too “socialistic.”83 It never went to print and somehow
Hardy lost—perhaps destroyed—the manuscript. In his later years, he
regretted the loss, and “An Indiscretion” was an attempt to reconstruct
80 “The Great Exhibition—No. VII,” John Bull (London, England) 2, no. 167 (Satur-
day, June 21, 1862): 394.
81 “Pictures British and Foreign: International Exhibition,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine 92 (September 1862): 357.
82 “An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress,” 81. Hardy also mentions Sir Joshua
Reynolds in his “Poetical Matter” Notebook and again in his “Schools of Paint-
ing” notebook. Notebook editors Michael Millgate and Pamela Dalziel point out
that Hardy would have been very familiar with the work of Sir Joshua Reyn-
olds from the 1862 International Exhibition and from Old Masters exhibitions
mounted annually in London. “Notebook”, n.9.9, 87.
83 Florence Emily Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1891 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 81.
the story. As Hardy himself describes it, “An Indiscretion” was “a sort
of patchwork of the remains of ‘The Poor Man & the Lady’,” a “pale
shadow” of that lost manuscript.84
If Hardy attempted to rewrite “The Poor Man,” did he ever attempt
to rewrite his early novel about Sissi? Although his “outline” has not
survived, I believe the traces of Sissi can be found in Hardy’s 1881 novel
A Laodicean. A lesser-known novel, its plot is animated by the clash of
modernity and antiquity. The heroine Paula Power lives in a medie-
val castle, which she has tricked out with two very modern amenities:
a telegraph and a gymnasium. Something of a new woman, her daily
workouts are inspired by “the physical training of the Greeks, whom
she adores.”85 The novel opens with a very striking scene, underpinned
by Hardy’s early training as an architect, of the spectacle of a castle with
telegraph wires disappearing through an arrow slit.
Sissi was powerful and lonely, she was an athlete, and she could not
live without a telegraph. It is Paula Power’s modernized regal dwelling
that carries a trace of Hardy’s obsession with Sissi. Sissi, in her twin
quests for foreign travel and excellent hunting, rented two castles in
the British Isles that she equipped with both a gymnasium and a tel-
egraph. In February of 1879, and then again the following year, Sissi
traveled to Ireland, staying at Summerhill House in County Meath.
Built in 1731 in the Palladian style, Summerhill was equipped with a
new chapel, gym, and telegraph in preparation for Sissi’s visit.86 And
in 1882, after a new alliance between the Habsburgs and the Coburgs
meant that it was no longer diplomatic for her to hunt in Ireland,87 Sissi
rented Combermere Abbey in Cheshire, a “huge pile that was installed
with a Catholic chapel and a telegraph and a gymnasium and even live
turtles for her game soup.”88 Could Hardy have known of these living
arrangements for his one-time crush object? He could. Sissi’s fashion
and travel arrangements were considered glamorous news items and
the periodical press reported details of her various stays in England
and Ireland. In The Manchester Times we find a representative account of
Sissi’s 1881 visit to Combermere:
84 Hardy, “An Indiscretion,” xvi.

85 Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991), 170.
86 “Summerhill, Meath, Ireland,” 1879 and 1880 Empress of Austria: Her British
Journeys (website). Available at: http://www.mkheritage.co.uk/eoa/docs/
Summerhill.html (accessed November 3, 2017).
87 Sissi’s trips to Ireland, and the great favor that the beautiful Catholic Empress
found there, had displeased Queen Victoria. Victoria was opposed to Irish
Home Rule and the issue was a great cause of friction between her and Prime
Minister Gladstone. She was delighted when, in 1886, Gladstone’s Home Rule
Bill was defeated. See Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria: A Personal History
(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001), 374.
88 Sinclair, Death By Fame, 106.
342 Sissi’s World
covered with a profusion of ivy, and looking, as it is, the beau

ideal of an English nobleman’s seat … The Abbey has undergone
a thorough renovation … the pointed Gothic windows in Her
Majesty’s rooms have been doubled, and the doors heightened.
There is a splendidly-carved fireplace in the bedroom, while the
oak tracery of the windows is beautiful … The Empress has had
one of her dressing rooms fitted up as a gymnasium. It is intended
that the library shall be used as a chapel.89
Readers are invited to run their fingertips over the customized lux-
ury of Sissi’s domestic spaces. The Empress is absent but imminent,
and the reader tours the building in advance of her, poking a head
into the rooms in which she will conduct her physical and spiritual
exercises. Everything is fitted to her needs, and we see the shape of
Sissi emerge, as a negative space, from these fitments. The architec-
tural details dwelt upon are all about scooped-out spaces; enlarged
openings of doors and windows, the hollows and dips of tracery and
carving. This focus on what is missing is a way of tracing Sissi’s miss-
ing outline.
Wax Queens
If Sissi is missing from this interior, is there only as an implicit body,
she would appear a few years later most explicitly, for public viewing
as a waxwork in Madame Tussaud’s museum.90 In November of 1854,
The Lady’s Newspaper excitedly announced that “a portrait-model of the
young Empress of Austria &c., is nearly ready.”91 Soon after, weekly
advertisements for the museum ran in a wide range of periodicals,
headlining the arrival of this new statue of Sissi. Sissi was popular
89 “The Empress of Austria’s Visit to Combermere,” The Manchester Times (Man-

chester, England), Saturday, February 19, 1881, 1209. British Library Newspapers,
Part I: 1800–1900 (website). Available at: http://www.gale.com/c/british-li-
brary-newspapers-part-i (accessed November 3, 2017).
90 Marie Tussaud opened her first permanent museum in Baker Street in 1835,
and it was in this space that the statue of Sissi was first exhibited. Her grand-
son Joseph Randall moved the museum in 1884 to a specially commissioned
building on Marylebone Road. Thomas Hardy enjoyed an after-hours visit to
this gallery in 1903, when Marie’s great-grandson John Tussaud allowed Hardy
hands-on access to the Napoleonic relics on display. Clement Shorter’s The
Sphere noted that this was Hardy’s first visit to the waxworks, and Shorter him-
self recalled “prancing about Tussauds’ by night, Hardy wearing the Waterloo
cocked hat!” See The Sphere: An Illustrated Newspaper for the Home 13 (June 20)
and Millgate, Thomas Hardy, 391. Thomas Hardy writes about the immobilized
but watchful wax figures in “At Madame Tussaud’s in Victorian Years,” pub-
lished in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses in 1917.
91 “Exhibitions,” The Lady’s Newspaper (London, England) 413 (Saturday, Novem-
ber 25, 1854): 327.
enough to be the sole focus of such advertisements, and her statue kept
company with the statue of Victoria that, since her coronation, had been
one of the most popular displays.92 Some 127 years later, in 1981, Diana
Princess of Wales joined the collection.93
What does it mean to become a wax queen?94 One answer would
be that to become a queen is to be made a living waxwork. The pro-
cess of coalescence and dissolution, the “being in full transformation”
for the purpose of being given to be seen, the displacement of self into
endless refractions, defines modern queenhood and waxworks equally.
As Marina Warner puts it, “Waxworks exude the spirit of death and
life equally […] both morbidity and the promise of immortality coex-
ist.”95 Writing about memorializations of Lady Diana, Diana Taylor
says the shrine housing her remains is a guarantor of “the materiality
of the global phenomenon that is ‘Diana’, the massive reappearance of
the revenant.”96 Taylor’s interest is the way that Diana’s iconicity leaves
a trace of herself that exceeds the “live” Diana. The Princess is, she
suggests, present in her memorializations as much as she “was absent
from her life.”97 Although Taylor does not theorize wax as a medium of
immortalization, she recalls that another iconic woman’s body—that
of Evita Peron—was cast three times in wax to confound would-be
body-snatchers,98 and Taylor is clearly interested in what Judith Roof
has called the “lure” of wax and the ability to “rivet the look” and
“provoke desire through displacement.”99 Wax, as a representational
92 The original coronation tableau of Victoria was updated with a marriage tableau
in 1840 and “changed thereafter as events dictated.” Plunkett, Victoria, 105.
93 Diana joined the Madame Tussaud’s display before the Royal Wedding. She
donated the dress worn by the model, one that she had worn previously to a
dinner in Althorp in 1980. Like Victoria’s, her statue was repeatedly updated by
Tussaud’s.
94 It should also be noted that the prominent waxwork artists of the seventeenth,
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—Mrs. Goldsmith, Mrs. Mills, Mrs. Salmon,
Madame Tussaud—were women, and that wax art was a way for these women
to acquire great fame. Marjan Sterckx notes that “Women’s involvement in the
modeling of wax effigies commissioned for Westminster Abbey between 1686
and 1806 is impressive. Of the original fourteen figures, at least six were made
by women—a testament to their fame and recognition of their expertise.” Mar-
jan Sterckx “Pride and Prejudice: Eighteenth-century Women Sculptors and
their Material Practices,” in Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830, ed. Jennie
Batchelor and Cora Kaplan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 96.
95 Marina Warner “Waxworks and Wonderlands,” in Visual Display: Culture Beyond
Appearances, ed. Lynne Cook and Peter Wollen (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 186.
99 Judith Roof, “Display Cases,” in Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites
the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2000), 110.
344 Sissi’s World
medium, has a there-but-not-there quality that differs from mimetic

forms like photography and cinema. In Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession,
Michelle Bloom explores wax’s peculiar ability or liability to “meta-
morphic events”—it can melt, it can re-solidify—suggesting that it is
therefore a medium with the capacity to provoke a discourse of “aes-
thetic dissolution.”100 The ultimate dissolution promised by wax, Bloom
argues, is the “postmodern dissolution of subjectivity,”101 but wax has
always been associated with some very pre-modern dissolutions too: of
the fetish, of forgetting, and of death.102
The history of wax sculpture finds its roots in death—in death masks
and votives, and Madame Tussaud herself claimed she perfected her art
by body-snatching victims of the French Revolution, specifically and
most famously, a queen; a wax sculpture of Marie Antoinette is rumored
to have been made from a death mask taken by Tussaud of the queen’s
bodiless head. Wax limns the threshold between life and death. A wax
figure compels because it is life-like, but not alive. And wax is, of course,
a medium that can take on representational capacity by manipulating
its threshold between liquid and solid states. Georges Didi-Huberman
observes how wax forms a hiatus between permanence and imperma-
nence: “It is a fragile and temporary material, but is most often used
for objects destined to endure.”103 There is a paradox inherent to the
immortalization of someone through wax; it is a material that threatens
to return to the state of dissolution that allowed it to conform to the
sculptor’s hand in the first place, and indeed, Madame Tussaud’s melts
down the statues of those no longer famous, to use the wax anew in the
making of effigies of the newly important.104
100 Michelle E. Bloom, Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2003), xiii.
101 Bloom, Waxworks, 212.
102 The receptive and memorializing capacities of wax have caused it to stand as
simile for the brain. Both Plato and Sigmund Freud turn to wax to think about
consciousness and memory. “Let me ask you to suppose,” writes Plato, “that
there’s an imprint-receiving piece of wax in our minds.” What is imprinted
remains, but what is “smudged out” we have “forgotten.” Plato, Theaetetus,
trans. John McDowell (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 191b. When
Freud becomes diverted by the “Wunderblock,” a writing tablet with wax slab
underneath a plastic sheet, upon which you can write with a stylus, he is most
compelled by the idea that the wax retains “lasting traces of the notations”
even after “erasure.” Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’,”
(1925), in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology (New York: Col-
lier Books, 1963), 212.
103 Georges Didi-Huberman, “Wax Flesh, Vicious Circles,” in Encyclopaedia Anatom-
ica, Museo La Specola Florence: A Complete Collection of Anatomical Waxes (Ger-
many: Taschen, 1999), 64.
104 Vanessa R. Schwartz quotes a French nineteenth-century journalist hailing a wax
museum as a “Pantheon of the day,” and she observes that the wax museum as a
Unsurprisingly, Charles Dickens explored the fascinations of the wax-

work. As editor of Household Words, he published an article on the subject
called “History in Wax,” and in The Old Curiosity Shop, he produces a
fictional version of Madame Tussaud in the form of Mrs Jarley, proprie-
tor of a waxworks in which Little Nell briefly resides.105 Mrs Jarley’s wax
figures are “waxen satellites.” Wax works might be life-like and life-size,
but they are also orbiting around an absence. And when it is a queen who
is cast in wax, the “satellite” quality of this waxen double opens up perils.
A king might uphold his power by having “two bodies,” but when Mar-
garet Homans explores Queen Victoria’s multiple bodies, she observes
“that Victoria was monarch only because of ‘failure of issue male’ means
that, whatever else she may represent, she always represents lack.”106
Wax holds the place between form and formlessness and casting a
queen in wax thus emphasizes her always-immanence and always-dis-
solution. Queen Victoria was patron to a wax modeler, Emma Peachey,
who was in residence at Kensington Palace to teach the art of making
wax flowers to the Princess Royal.107 Peachey published a book on the
craft, and in the preface, her editor emphasizes the medium’s ability
to immortalize: “short-lived beauties die away,” he writes, but wax
“perpetuates the transient glories.”108 Princesses especially dramatize
such transience in their very being; that they are trained in the art of
suspended animation makes perfect sense. After all, the oldest statue
in Madame Tussaud’s is a statue of a princess, and more specifically,
a statue of a princess suspended, awaiting transformation: Sleeping
form “mimicked the newspaper in its commitment to rapid reporting and con-
stant change.” Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in
Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 110.
105 Dudley Costello, “History in Wax,” Household Words 9 (February 18, 1854):
17–20.
106 Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–
1876 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xxix.
107 Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s heroine Aurora Leigh models wax flowers as a
girlish “accomplishment” that she undertakes to please the aunt who is rais-
ing her. But it is Aurora’s natural self that ends up fixed and mounted, a result
of being moulded to womanhood: the aunt seeks, “To prick me to a pattern
with her pin,/Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf.” The wax modeling of
flowers and other natural forms was a prominent Victorian craft for women. In
Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), Talia Schaffer titles her Introduction “How
to Read Wax Coral, and Why.” Several how-to books were published on the
craft. See, for example, John Mintorn, Lessons in Flower and Fruit Modelling in
Wax (1870), or The Book of Fruits and Flowers in Wax-Work (1850). Thad Logan’s,
The Victorian Parlor: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001) also has excellent material on domestic wax arts.
108 The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling by Mrs Peachey Artiste to Her Majesty
(London: Published and Sold by Mrs Peachey, Artiste to Her Majesty: 1851), x.
346 Sissi’s World
Beauty. This waxwork, dating back to 1763, is the work not of Tussaud
but of her mentor, Philippe Curtius. Beauty sleeps indecorously on a
chaise longue, one arm thrown up and half covering the face, the tender
neck exposed, the body twisted in a rich silk gown, the hair tumbling
free. A mechanism makes the breast rise and fall, simulating breathing.
This seems to be the sleep of only a few moments, not of a hundred
years (or 250 years and counting, for this venerable waxwork). She is
waiting, and we watch her wait. We wait, too. We watch princesses not
for what they are doing, but for what they are going to do next. If we
remember back to the newspaper articles that made readers privy to
the renovations of Sissi’s English homes, what were being shown were
the processes of making and re-making that surround a royal female
body. These scenes of formation express the condition of the impera-
trix-turned-royal-celebrity; when we look for a queen, we see instead
a queen-in-the-making, an intimate staging. We might learn, in fact, to
hear a different cadence to the term used for attendants of a queen—the
“lady-in-waiting” does not merely “wait” in the sense of “serves,” but
she waits because a queen can only ever be radically imminent, poised
on the verge.
The connection I am drawing between imperial female bodies in
flux and waxen representations of them must come to rest on an under-
standing that fat is ontologically related to wax. When the world was lit
by candles, a beeswax candle was the luxury version of the tallow light:
in other words, most candles were made from animal fat. Beeswax was
fragrant, luminous, aesthetically pleasing, and mythically suggestive
(Matthew Arnold’s nineteenth-century dictum, “sweetness and light”
refers to the two scented and literarily resonant products of the hive).
Tallow, on the other hand, guttered and smoked, stank of flesh, and
was less white. Since tallow was the cheaper option, it was burned in
homes where body fat was in short supply, eroded by poverty, or in
some fictions, was excessive and threatening, due to phobias about
bodies, usually female, usually mobile. As Michael Moon points out,
Charles Dickens “is close to the modern nerve with his authentic loath-
ing for the fat, female body,” writing fictions in which “the gibbous
flesh [of precariously middle-class fat women] might be carved directly
from the narrow shanks of the smaller bodies—bodies of children, of
the poor—in which Dickens saw himself.”109 Dickens was, commensu-
rately, past master at turning humans into candles: Samuel Pickwick’s
surname suggests a cheap and common kind of light—a floating wick
in tallow that you would have to pick at to keep it lit; in Edwin Drood, six
short-lived brothers “went out, one by one, as they were born, like six
little rushlights”; in Bleak House, Krook’s spontaneous combustion turns
109 Sedgwick, Tendencies, 233.

him into greasy residue, a “stagnant, sickening oil”; in Great Expecta-

tions Estella refers to herself as a candle, and Miss Haversham burns
like one. The collusions between the waxwork and the living subject
were not delimited to the uncanny lifelikeness of the representation,
the genuine articles of clothing, nor the human hair stitched into wax
scalps; if in looking for what we might call the melting point, that is to
say, the material similarity between fat and wax, the ability of us all to
become our representations, to become different versions of ourselves,
and to become each other, we find the closest kinship between the effigy
and the subject. Fat in the Western metaphysical tradition is seen, as
Jana Evans Braziel writes, as “intrinsically devoid of form,” a lack of
fixity that easily turns literally into abject flux—to become “manifest in
an oozing liquidity.”110 The fat of the fat woman shimmers with “disfig-
uring liquidity” and threatens—she theorizes, via the work of Deleuze
and Guattari—the “immutability of Being in a transcendent realm.”111
To be a wax queen, then, frozen seemingly in time, is to dramatize
through the mutability of wax, the stuff of representation, and fat, the
stuff of flesh, exactly the mutability of any “realm,” transcendent or
otherwise. Wax queens are always on the verge of melting, like Snow
White into life or like her stepmother into death, or more importantly
perhaps, melting into one another, becoming the adipose, formless stuff
of the next incarnation, the next princess, the next England, the next
Austria. The first princess in Madame Tussaud’s, the fictional Sleeping
Beauty, will presumably, if Madame Tussaud’s lasts another three cen-
turies, also be the last princess. Sissi is no longer on display—the thou-
sand years of notoriety predicted by Mark Twain did not last a century
outside of the German-speaking world. Perhaps someday Victoria and
Diana will also be melted down and made into their next incarnations;
in this way, waxen queens and princesses become mere ladies-in-wait-
ing to each other.
Princess Au Revoir
The most sensational nineteenth-century biography of Sissi, The Martyr-
dom of an Empress, was indeed written by a lady-in-waiting. Although
she wrote anonymously, Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen’s biography offered
readers domestic intimacy with the recently assassinated Sissi. After
her own death Cunliffe-Owen also became herself the subject of a biog-
raphy written by the American friend who lived with Marguerite and
her husband on Staten Island. This biography sought to put a name, a
face, and a life to the woman who had written Martyrdom anonymously,
and who subsequently published only as “Author of The Martyrdom of
110 Braziel, “Sex and Fat Chics,” 239.

111 Braziel, “Sex and Fat Chics,” 243 and 244.
348 Sissi’s World
an Empress.” Ironically, this biography of the biographer was never pub-

lished, in large part because of worries that other persons connected to
Cunliffe-Owen’s life story might sue. The biographer, Edward Forrester
Sutton, was a doctor, a poet, and a Princeton alumnus. The manuscript
of his 1929 biography, along with some of Marguerite’s own papers and
memorabilia, are lodged in the Princeton Rare Books Collection, where
I was the first to cut the cord on the manuscript since it was first tied
up many decades ago.112 “The Princess Au Revoir” is a riveting read,
and its details convince me that Marguerite was indeed a once-beloved
lady-in-waiting to Sissi.
Sutton describes a young Marguerite as—like Sissi—a tomboy. (This
gendering was so foundational to Marguerite that Sutton writes the
first chapter using the male pronoun and a male name, “Pierrot.”) Also
like Sissi, Marguerite was a fearless horsewoman, went to her wedding
night virginal and ignorant, and had a head of cascading chestnut hair.
Brought to the attention of the Empress by her “reckless” riding, “the
Horse was the original bond between them,”113 and the Empress’s sym-
pathy for Marguerite’s miserable marriage led to Marguerite living at
court. Sutton observes that although Sissi began as the protector, Mar-
guerite’s “common-sense” and “masterful spirit” meant that in time the
“mutual position was somewhat reversed.”114 Sutton quotes Margue-
rite directly, describing how much Sissi was unsuited to the duties of
imperial life. This is how Marguerite illustrates her point: “For instance,
it was her duty to be stared at—part of the game. She disliked it and
wouldn’t be stared at, especially when she began to show her age.”115
Marguerite, it turns out, was something of a solution to Sissi’s aversion
to being specularized. Sutton recalls:
She said she often substituted for the Empress. Their hair and
coloring were much the same [… Marguerite] was a charming
avatar of the Empress, while the latter followed behind in another
carriage untroubled by the gaze of the populace and the necessity
of returning salutes.116
112 Edward Forrester, “The Princess Au Revoir,” 1940, Sutton and Cunliffe-Owen
Collection, Box 1 Folder 2; Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books
and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey.
The opening pages of Chapter 1 have a lengthy handwritten note (on verso), in
which Forrester describes his brother’s disapproval of the book and fears that it
might be libelous to publish. He says he will leave it to his Alma Mater to decide
the matter.
113 Forrester, “The Princess Au Revoir,” 65.
Barbara Cartland saved Sissi from the exhaustions of imperial duty via
a novelistic bed trick. In this passage, we learn that Sissi had, in actual
fact, performed the bed trick to the same effect.117 In Forrester’s account,
Marguerite and Sissi change places with each other, just as they had
switched roles of protector and protected. This arrangement allowed
the Empress not only relief from being looked at, but the opportunity
to look at her “charming avatar,” herself, being looked at.118 “Avatar”
is originally a Sanskrit word, which might suggest that Marguerite
was put in a similar position to the “Oriental beauties” in Sissi’s photo
album. Once again, Sissi is using the body of another to both shield
herself and also provide her with the specular perspective required to
examine the process of specularization.
This mise-en-abyme quality of the scenario is echoed in another chap-
ter of “Princess Au Revoir.” Forrester recalls: “In London [Marguerite]
had once gone to Madame Tussaud’s to see a wax-work of the Empress
and some of her Court Ladies, including herself. Now in Central Park
she dropped in at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be confronted
by her own portrait.”119 The painting to which Forrester is referring is
Hungarian artist Hans Makart’s enormous “Diana’s Hunting Party”
(1880).120 Forrester, whose whole biographical project is about filling
in the blank of “anonymous,” explains that these mythic nymphs and
goddesses had real life counterparts: “Leaders of the Viennese great
world were models for some of the draped figures, queens of the stage
for the undraped.”121 Forrester’s gentle wit is incisive: queens mix with
queens of the stage, as models, because all these kinds of women live in
worlds in which they are always on display. When Marguerite encoun-
ters life-size representations of herself and Sissi at the Metropolitan and
at Madame Tussaud’s, the “revoir” of Forrester’s title, “Princess Au
Revoir,” resonates. These encounters are a seeing again; they bear wit-
ness to being seen, again and again, by a public.
117 Similarly, Andrew Sinclair recounts that when Sissi visited Britain and went
bathing in the sea (an activity popularized by Queen Victoria), “crowds watched
her from cliffs with field-glasses, so Marie Festetics and another decoy had to
put on flannel bathing-gowns and come into the water to deceive the viewers.”
Sinclair, Death By Fame, 81.
120 Forrester, “The Princess Au Revoir,” 144, emphasizes the scale of the piece: “The
name of the Austrian artist escapes recollection, but the canvas is still there,
though said to be no longer hung for want of space, for it is a huge thing that
used to cover almost the entire south end of the main hall in the old building.”
This image was therefore on par with the life-size representations at Madame
Tussaud’s.
350 Sissi’s World
Returning to Tears
Wax that portends dissolution invites us to review the malleable bod-
ies of Victoria, Sissi, and Diana: Victoria’s increasing girth, Sissi’s
disciplined emaciation, and Diana’s bulimic vacillation. In spite of
media-driven insistence that we parse these bodies, unendingly, it is
clear that these states are one and the same with each other. These bod-
ies are all defined by the space they occupy, and they are all simultane-
ously specularized and spectralized, at once material and immaterial.
Perhaps this is why Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems on the inaugu-
ration of Victoria dissolve so readily into tears. Tears, like wax, memo-
rialize. They express the transitional body. And Barrett Browning’s
lines have a prophetic cast to them: Victoria would, across her lifetime,
become the embodiment of mourning. Her black garbed stoutness evi-
denced stubborn sorrow. Sissi, too, wore mourning so complete that
her strings of pearls were black.122 And Diana famously saved a specific
little black dress to wear on the day the world learned that her husband
had been unfaithful to her. Garbed in skimpy silk mourning she turned
away from her miserable marriage, trying on defiance and revenge for
size, but still looking like “melancholia incarnate.”123 This term, though,
might undo itself; for these imperatrices, melancholia dissolved their
bodies, made them not incarnate, but un-carnate. Turned into icons,
these women lost their singular selves in service of imperial multitudes.
They “dried the tears of countless wretches”124 but were lost, dissolved
away in their own.
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Fourteen
Sisi in the Museum: Exhibits
in Vienna and the US
Susanne Kelley
Sisi, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, is a historical figure

around whom a construct of mythical narratives, informed by a multi-
tude of contradictions, began to develop during her lifetime and con-
tinues to circulate to this day. Historians, museum curators, authors,
and filmmakers have retold her story in myriad versions. Most recently,
American author Allison Pataki published a two-volume historical fic-
tion series about Sisi’s life.1 She, like millions of tourists visiting the city
of Vienna annually, discovered that “everywhere I went, I saw images
of this striking woman. Her smile looked a little mysterious, a little
sad, like there was more behind it. I thought this is a really intriguing
woman. Why don’t I know more about her?”2 A tourist visiting Vien-
na’s well-known attractions, such as St. Stephan’s cathedral, the Impe-
rial and Schönbrunn palaces, or even Café Demel really has no choice
but to learn about Sisi, as Vienna Tourism references her throughout
the city.3 On the one hand, Sisi is marketed as a guiding lens through
which the tourist can experience Vienna’s former imperialism; on the
other, the exhibits related to her all tend to include a moment in which
they claim to set right previous misconceptions attributed to her story.
In other words, the tellers of Sisi’s story ensure that the task is never
complete, and the contradictions made manifest through comparison
of each new version with a former one continue to attract interest in the
empress in Vienna and, as Pataki’s volumes show, also abroad.
1 Allison Pataki, The Accidental Empress (Brentwood, TN: Howard Books, 2015)
and Sisi: Empress on her Own (New York, NY: Random House, 2016).
2 Amy Scribner, “Allison Pataki: The Tragic Life Of A People’s Princess,” Book-
Page (March 2016): https://bookpage.com/interviews/19478-allison-pataki#.
WWs2JtOGPOQ.
3 Vienna Tourism, “In the Footsteps of the Habsburgs,” Vienna Now-Forever:
https://www.wien.info/en/sightseeing/sights/imperial/footsteps-habsburgs
356 Sissi’s World
In 2015, the Kunsthistorisches Museum brought the Habsburgs to the

United States. From February 15, 2015 to January 17, 2016 the exhibit
“Habsburg Splendor” traveled to The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. In
Vienna only a few months later, from March 16 to November 27, 2016, the
Schloss Schönbrunn Kultur- und Betriebsges.m.b.H., in cooperation with
the Kunsthistorisches Museum, organized the four-part exhibit “Franz
Joseph” to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Emperor
Franz Joseph’s death. “Man and Monarch” was installed at Schloss
Schönbrunn, “Majesty and Modesty” at the Kaiserliche Wagenburg,
“Festivities and Everyday Life” at the Hofmobiliendepot, and “Hunt-
ing and Recreation” at the Jagdschloss Niederweiden. Contrasting the
above-mentioned focus on the Habsburgs with Sisi as a focal point, these
two exhibits not only relegated her to an ancillary role, but more so, man-
aged to turn her into a disruptive element within the narratives of the
exhibits, as well as within the marketing materials. My analysis looks
at the exhibits and published catalogs, along with the related advertise-
ments, souvenir merchandise, and published critiques. I thereby treat the
exhibits and surrounding cultural production as elements of a broader
historical and cultural narrative produced by Viennese institutions about
Vienna. Each representation of Vienna’s history, through the curation of
an exhibit or design of a related souvenir product, represents one version
or aspect of a story that experts and tourists alike are still discovering.
Three concepts are central to the visitors’ experience of Vienna’s his-
tory and its representatives as they are displayed and communicated
by institutions such as the Kunsthistorisches Museum and Schloss
Schönbrunn: the visitors’ quest for the complete story, their gaze upon
those whose story is told, and the articles, mostly clothing and acces-
sories, that embody those represented. Vienna markets the story of the
two popular royals Sisi and Franz Joseph through the city itself, and
the experience facilitates a quest for the visitor who seeks to learn and
see all the city has to offer about the couple most closely connected
to the remaining Habsburg presence. Vienna Tourism recommends to
its tourists the discovery of the city by following a sequence of major
Habsburg landmarks4 or by following Sisi’s story throughout the city.5
John Urry distinguishes tourist sites in his book The Tourist Gaze by
the type of gaze that meets them: “whether they are an object of the
romantic or collective tourist gaze; whether they are historical or mod-
ern; and whether they are presented as authentic or inauthentic.”6 He
4 Vienna Tourism, “In the Footsteps of the Habsburgs.”

5 Vienna Tourism, “Sisi’s Vienna,” Vienna Now-Forever: https://www.wien.info/
en/sightseeing/sights/imperial/sisis-vienna (accessed November 2, 2017).
6 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2nd edn. (London: Sage Publications, 2005), 94.
Sisi in the Museum 357
ties the feeling of nostalgia closely to the romantic or collective gaze

and questions whether heritage sites are automatically historical and
authentic. In the case of Vienna, I would argue that the tourist locations
most closely tied to the Habsburgs, such as the Imperial Palace, are his-
torical, but the extent to which the exhibits within them evoke Sisi and
Franz Joseph serves to encourage the tourist to engage in a romantic or
nostalgic gaze at these sites and their contents. Urry further cites rural
and industrial museums as examples of “museums that are concerned
with ‘representations’ of history, and what has happened is a remark-
able increase in the range of histories worthy of being represented.”7 I
observe that attention to the personal lives of driving historical figures
represents another aspect of this development.
For the visitors, figures such as Sisi and Franz Joseph come to life
through the clothes they wore, the daily artifacts they touched and used,
and the places through which they moved. The exhibits in and outside
of Vienna all include clothing articles to represent not only their wearer,
but also their story, and the history of Austria and the Habsburgs.
According to Urry, “we do not literally ‘see’ things. Particularly as tour-
ists we see objects constituted as signs. They stand for something else.
When we gaze as tourists what we see are various signs or tourist cli-
chés. Some such signs function metaphorically.”8 How the metaphor
is read, however, depends on both the presentation of the sign and the
audience viewing it. Although a select few of the same items appeared
in the exhibits “Habsburg Splendor” and “Franz Joseph,” the context
into which they were placed facilitated a different interpretation of the
articles. The focus of “Habsburg Splendor” was the art and artifacts the
various rulers of Habsburg collected as a reflection of their values and
stories. The American audience was to take away insights about the
cultural richness of contemporary Austria. The exhibit, therefore, also
played a part in the national branding of Austria as a historically sig-
nificant country. “Franz Joseph,” on the other hand, addressed Vienna’s
tourists and the Viennese alike. The city is approaching a population of
two million, but hosts about fourteen million overnight stays by tour-
ists per year, most of them from international destinations.9 The exhibit
served not only to educate the domestic and international public about
previously underrepresented aspects of Franz Joseph I, but also as a
guide around the city due to the distribution of the exhibit across four
locations, thereby incorporating the element of the touristic quest.
Both exhibits told a Habsburg story not told before and not otherwise
7 Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 118.

9 City of Vienna, “Vienna in Figures 2016,” Statistik Wien: https://www.wien.
gv.at/statistik/pdf/viennainfigures-2016.pdf (accessed November 2, 2017).
358 Sissi’s World
found in permanent exhibits within the city of Vienna. Both exhibits

purposefully downplayed representations of Empress Elisabeth, yet
as the paragraphs below will show, Sisi popped up repeatedly in the
marketing narrative around the actual exhibits, thereby undermining
her exclusion and the exhibits’ focus on the historical gaze and rather
turning the focus towards a nostalgic gaze on the part of both presenter
and audience.
Sisi in Vienna
Sisi and her husband Emperor Franz Joseph represent an important
and lasting element of Vienna’s city marketing. As Briavel Holcomb
observes, “history sells and heritage is hyped. Despite critics who argue
that the nostalgia industry distorts and commodifies the past, allusions
to art and hints of heritage are vital colors in the urban marketer’s pal-
ette.”10 Vienna Tourism neither hides nor apologizes for the Habsburg
presence with Franz Joseph and Sisi at its center, but celebrates it and
capitalizes on it. When in Vienna, one can not only experience Sisi vis-
cerally through a shared physical location with the empress, but one
can also purchase her images on innumerable souvenir objects such as
postcards, t-shirts, mugs, bags, trays, chocolates and more. Several per-
manent exhibits are devoted to her story, accessible via the discount
“Sisi Ticket.”11 In Vienna, Sisi is by design part and parcel of the city’s
experience. She serves a nostalgic and economic purpose for the city
of Vienna and its touristic and cultural programming. Yet it seems that
each contemporary exhibit about Sisi in Vienna also justifies its work by
claiming to correct the myths surrounding her.
Main themes at the center of this exercise of writing and rewriting
myths around Sisi are the nature of her relationship with Emperor
Franz Joseph, the level of her popularity at the time of her life, and
her eating habits. The first two passages on the audio tour in Vien-
na’s Sisi Museum introduce the exhibit as addressing the origin of the
mythical Elisabeth.12 The exhibit begins by pointing out the limited
representation of Sisi in contemporary newspapers: “It is evident that
during her lifetime Elisabeth did not dominate the front pages of the
press as the beautiful, popular and acclaimed empress […] It was not
until after her tragic death that Elisabeth became stylized as an empress
10 Briavel Holcomb, “Marketing Cities for Tourism,” in The Tourist City, ed. Dennis
R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 65.
11 Vienna Tourism, “Sisi Museum.”
12 Hofburg/Kaiserappartements/Sisi Museum/Silberkammer, “Sisi Museum
Audioguides,” Schloss Schönbrunn Kultur u. BetriebsgmbH (2012): paragraphs
31–2. See text at: https://www.hofburg-wien.at/fileadmin/user_upload/
Schoenbrunn/Media/Audioguides_hofburg/Lesetext_Sisi_EN_2012.pdf
revered for her selflessness and goodness—thus establishing another

false image.” Number 47 on the Sisi Museum audio tour also counters
such rumors as Elisabeth consuming raw meat juice and starving her-
self: “[…] the raw veal was tenderized in a meat press and resulting
juices seasoned and boiled before Elisabeth drank them. The story that
the empress consistently starved herself in order to remain slim should
also be consigned to the realm of legend; receipts from various pastry
shops show that Elisabeth was extremely fond of confectionery and ice-
cream.” To underline the last point, Vienna Tourism even lists the Con-
fectioner Demel as a suggested stop on “Sisi’s Vienna” tour.13
The focus on correcting misperceptions connected to Sisi reflects the
increased responsibility museums claim to take for their audiences’
education, or “public pedagogy.”14 Most of the literature about Empress
Elisabeth, including two recent books sold in the Hofburg Museum
Shop, include a section on Sisi’s health and body image, as well as on
the presumed truths about her relationship with Franz Joseph, both top-
ics that have drawn the interest of past and contemporary audiences.
Katrin Unterreiner’s Sisi: Mythos und Wahrheit and Michaela and Karl
Vocelka’s Sisi: Leben und Legende einer Kaiserin both contain chapters on
Sisi’s “beauty cult,” “slimness obsession,” and daily fitness and hygiene
routines,15 and both books thematize Sisi’s wedding day depression.16
According to Michaela and Karl Vocelka, the ambivalence at the center
of Sisi’s personality, lifestyle, image, and historical framework drives
the fascination we still have for her.17 On the one hand, she is enviable
for her status, beauty, and historical impact, on the other she is pitia-
ble for her unhappiness and the negative attention she received from
her contemporaries. The incorporation of the constantly shifting myths
about Sisi into Vienna’s self-representation has become an effective
and lasting strategy to attract tourists.18 As Allison Pataki mentioned
when discussing the trip that gave her inspiration for her Sisi novels,
this strategy communicates that Sisi is everywhere a tourist goes while
discovering Vienna and the Habsburgs.
In her commentary on Vienna’s museum culture, Julie Johnson points
out the unusual approach Vienna’s display culture began to take around
1900. “Not only was the city of Vienna undergoing museumification,
13 Vienna Tourism, “Sisi’s Vienna.”

14 Shari Sabeti, “‘Inspired to Be Creative?’: Persons, Objects, and the Public Peda-
gogy of Museums,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2015): 114.
15 Katrin Unterreiner, Sisi: Mythos und Wahrheit (Vienna: Brandstätter, 2015), 73;
and Michaela and Karl Vocelka, Sisi: Leben und Legende einer Kaiserin (Munich:
C.H. Beck, 2014), 65 and 69.
16 Unterreiner, Sisi: Mythos und Wahrheit, 30; and Vocelka, Sisi: Leben und Legende,
27.
17 Vocelka, Sisi: Leben und Legende, 123.
18 Vocelka, Sisi: Leben und Legende, 122.
360 Sissi’s World
but so too were its imperial collections in their references to the glory
of the Habsburgs.”19 The immense collections of art and artifacts were
made viewable to the public as early as the eighteenth century, and “by
1900, Vienna had become a city of museums—and almost a museum
itself.”20 Unlike other cities, however, which spread out large collections
thematically, in Vienna the Kunsthistorisches Museum plays the role of
a Kunstkammer in which individual members of the Habsburg family
remain integrated into the display of the art they collected and passed
down, for instance, by organizing the art by collector and thereby add-
ing a layer of memorialization to the display of a collection.21 According
to a 2015 article in Der Standard, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum
ranks as the most popular Austrian museum based on the informal
tourist ratings on tripadvisor.com.22 This reception supports Vienna’s
strategy of linking high culture to people, like art to its collector, or a
city to the royal who once lived in it. External programming the institu-
tions offer to their diverse visitors often concentrates on the individuals
connected to the displayed art instead of the art itself.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Schloss Schönbrunn Kultur-
und Betriebsges.m.b.H. are two institutions which develop compre-
hensive educational programming for all ages around their exhibits in
Vienna. Shari Sabeti observes that “museums and galleries have come
under increasing pressure from policy agendas in the last decade or so
to justify their existence as public institutions through their roles as edu-
cators.”23 When the Kunsthistorisches Museum opened, it was “the first
time in history all the Habsburg art collections were made fully acces-
sible to the public.”24 Beyond the audio-tours, the Kunsthistorisches
Museum offers public, private, and specialized tours of its collections
along with projects designed for school children.25 Schloss Schönbrunn
also offers a multitude of events for children, designed to help them
19 Julie Johnson, “‘The Streets of Vienna are Paved with Culture, the Streets of
Other Cities with Asphalt’: Museums and Material Culture in Vienna—A Com-
ment,” Austrian Yearbook 46 (2015): 92.
20 Johnson, “‘The Streets of Vienna are Paved with Culture’,” 89–90.
21 Johnson, “‘The Streets of Vienna are Paved with Culture’,” 93.
22 “Die zehn beliebtesten Museen Österreichs,” Der Standard (September 17, 2015).
Available at: http://derstandard.at/2000022247202/Die-zehn-beliebtesten-Mu-
seen-Oesterreichs (accessed November 2, 2017).
23 Sabeti, “‘Inspired to Be Creative?’” 113.
24 Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner, “The Habsburgs: Empire and Art,” in Habsburg
Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections at the Kunsthistorisches
Museum, ed. Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2015), 41.
25 The museum website lists tours for the blind, tours and workshops for kids,
as well as a project addressing the experience of migration. Kunsthistorisches
Museum Wien, “Learn,” KHM-Museumsverband. Available at: https://www.
khm.at/en/learn/ (accessed November 2, 2017).
“experience history.”26 In 2016, the Kindermuseum, for example, offered

the special tour “When I grow up, I will be emperor,”27 supplementing
the “Franz Joseph” exhibit. Since the special exhibits themselves serve
to educate the local and international public about a certain aspect of a
museum’s collection or focus, the supplementing programming fulfills
a second layer of this educational mission. Through it, the institutions
ensure that their particular focus is palatable and digestible for diverse
audiences.
Apart from serving an educational role for international visitors,
the four-part exhibit “Franz Joseph” addressed the remaining affec-
tion the Viennese have for one of the last empowered representatives
of the Habsburgs, as the event was put together to commemorate,
celebrate, but also critically reflect “the personality of the emperor.”28
In a press release, the CEO of the Schloss Schönbrunn Kultur- und
Betriebsges.m.b.H., Franz Sattlecker, is quoted as having said: “I think
we have succeeded in presenting a detailed overall view of the person
Franz Joseph as well as conveying the political effects of his in part
ambivalent actions. It would be a special pleasure for me if this exhi-
bition sparked the visitors’ interest in this last phase of the Habsburg
Monarchy.”29 Indeed, the exhibits put together by the Schönbrunn team
focused on the telling of the emperor’s story, whereas the “Majesty and
Modesty” exhibit at the Wagenburg included a different representa-
tional approach. The aim clearly was to customize the experience of the
Wagenburg exhibit by shifting the perspective of the visitors through
the stories told. Via the audio guide, one could look at certain objects
through Franz Joseph’s eyes, Sisi’s eyes, or the curator’s eyes that pro-
vided a general overview.
“Franz Joseph” was a collection of exhibits tied together into one
location-superseding narrative, which the visitor only had access to
in its entirety if he or she traveled to different parts of the city. As it
happens, three of the four locations were also recommended stops for
26 Schloss Schönbrunn/Hofburg/Hofmobiliendepot, “Kinderprogramm,” Schloss

Schönbrunn (2017). Available at: http://www.kaiserkinder.at/ (accessed
November 2, 2017).
27 “Themenführung ‘Wenn ich gross bin, werde ich Kaiser’,” Schloss Schönbrunn.
Available at: http://www.kaiserkinder.at/kindermuseum/kinderprogramm/
themenfuehrung-wenn-ich-gross-bin-werde-ich-kaiser.html (accessed Novem-
ber 2, 2017).
28 “Franz Joseph 1830–1916,” Schloss Schönbrunn Kultur- und Betriebsges.m.b.H.
(2015). Available at: http://www.franzjoseph2016.at/en/ (accessed November
2, 2017).
29 Florian Müller, “Press Release: A Very Different Kind Of Audience,” Schloss
Schönbrunn Kultur- und Betriebsges.m.b.H., March 15, 2016. Available at: http://
www.franzjoseph2016.at/wp-content/uploads/01press-release-Franz-Joseph_
final.pdf (accessed November 2, 2017).
362 Sissi’s World
the tourist on the quest to tour “Sisi’s Vienna.”30 In The Tourist Gaze,
John Urry observes an increased emphasis in museum design “on the
participation by visitors in the exhibits themselves.”31 While each of
the “Franz Joseph” exhibits alone was not part of the kind of “‘living’
museum” he writes about in this context, the breaking up of an exhibit
across several locations shifted responsibility to the visitor who had to
decide which parts to see and then travel to in their respective locations.
Yet, because each component had its designated theme, each exhibit
location was able to function on its own. But unless one indeed visited
more than one part of the “Franz Joseph” exhibit, one did not compre-
hend the connections one missed by not engaging in the activity of the
quest created by visiting all of the four sites.
Repeatedly, the exhibits cross-referenced each other, most imme-
diately through the advertising posters at the entrance to each loca-
tion, pointing the visitor to the other three. Additionally, the audio
guide in each exhibit likewise included a pointer to the other three
locations, which it recommended visiting as well. This cross-referenc-
ing also extended to individual items, making the quest much more
intricate and expanded. One such instance occured with Sisi’s court
saloon carriage that was designed specifically for her in 1873. “Festiv-
ities and Everyday Life” in the Hofmobiliendepot included a design
sketch of this carriage, whereas the actual item is located at Vienna’s
Technisches Museum, where the description of the sketch in the Hof-
mobiliendepot pointed the visitor. Curiously, though, the sketch is not
included in the catalog for the “Franz Joseph” exhibit, underlining the
visitor’s need to embark on the entire quest for a truly complete view-
ing experience.
Not unlike the demythologization efforts in the exhibits in Vienna
about Empress Elisabeth, narratives accompanying the displayed items
in the “Franz Joseph” exhibit aimed to counteract idealized perspec-
tives on the emperor. The multimedia article “Kaiser Franz Joseph I,
‘Die kalte Sonne’” in Der Standard32 not only provided an overview of
the exhibition but also qualified its significance. Integrated video foot-
age included interviews with two of its curators: Karl Vocelka, historian
and curator of “People and Ruler,” “Festivities and Everyday Life,” and
“Hunting and Recreation,” and Mario Döberl, historian and curator
of “Majesty and Modesty.” Both curators commented on select items
within their exhibit, but also used their interview time to debunk a few
30 Vienna Tourism, “Sisi’s Vienna.”

32 Hans Rauscher, Sebastian Pumberger, and Christian Fischer, “Kaiser Franz
Joseph I—Die kalte Sonne,” Der Standard March 27, 2016. Available at: http://
derstandard.at/2000032894628/Kaiser-Franz-Joseph-I-Die-kalte-Sonne
of the myths about Franz Joseph. Vocelka, whose interview was set in
the Schloss Schönbrunn exhibit, focused on Franz Joseph’s political
weaknesses, whereas Döberl undermined Franz Joseph’s reputed fru-
gality by citing regular expenses that even a higher administrator with
a solid annual income could not have afforded.
The focus of the four exhibits, of course, was Franz Joseph. Given
that the goal was his celebration, the attempt to marginalize Sisi was
a justified approach. Yet, in the marketing narrative around the exhib-
its, Sisi popped up at seemingly random moments, interrupting the
main message. Although both curators concentrated on Franz Joseph
in the videos, the items showcased demonstrate a different approach
and narrative. Both videos discussed one of Sisi’s exhibited items,
thereby interrupting their narratives about Franz Joseph, as neither
item was explicitly connected to the ongoing discussion of the emperor.
In the midst of commenting on Franz Joseph’s political qualities, the
video suddenly cut to Karl Vocelka commenting on Sisi’s wedding
jewelry (minute 1:28–1:46). It included no other information about
Franz Joseph’s and Sisi’s marriage or wedding, but cut straight back
to Vocelka describing the emperor’s diplomatic skills.33 The reason for
including these 18 seconds showing and discussing Sisi’s wedding jew-
elry was not clear from the rest of the narrative in this interview and
rendered it a mere interruption of the main topic.
A similar moment occurred in the video featuring Mario Döberl,
who also broke his narrative about Franz Joseph to turn to Sisi.34 While
attempting to correct the narrative about Franz Joseph’s frugal life-
style by citing economic standards of the time, when he stopped to talk
about Sisi, he chose to discuss Empress Elisabeth’s waistline and cited
unhealthy eating habits as its cause, a myth the Sisi-oriented exhibits
repeatedly try to disparage. Although the segment about Sisi’s dress
followed a showcasing of Franz Joseph’s uniform, which Döberl con-
nected to his discussion and critique of Franz Joseph’s extravagant
finances, the discussion of Sisi’s dress broke the economic narrative and
turned to the myth of her body culture, a topic not logically connected
to the “Majesty and Modesty” theme of the exhibit. In contrast to the
attention it received in the promotional video, the catalog includes Elis-
abeth’s black dress exhibited at the Kaiserliche Wagenburg only as the
note: “Black Dress of the Empress Elisabeth.”35 While Döberl could not
resist including Sisi’s dress in the promotional video, a picture of it did
not make it into the catalog. Standing in front of the authentic item and
33 Rauscher, Pumberger, and Fischer, “Kaiser Franz Joseph I—Die kalte Sonne.”
34 Mario Döberl, “Kaiser Franz Joseph I—Die kalte Sonne,” Der Standard, March
27, 2016, video 2:20–2:57.
35 “Objects Exhibited: Wagenburg,” in Franz Joseph 1830–1926, ed. Karl Vocelka
and Martin Mutschelechner (Vienna: Brandstätter, 2016), 230.
364 Sissi’s World
knowing that it touched the body of a historical figure of interest is an

experience that cannot be replicated in a catalog.
Despite Elisabeth’s relative absence from the physical exhibit in
Vienna, the “Franz Joseph” catalog includes her story quite extensively,
albeit in her husband’s context and not reaching beyond the typical top-
ics of beauty, body culture, and unhappy marriage. Two articles that
thematize Franz Joseph’s private life, “The Private Emperor” by Olivia
Lichtscheidl and Michael Wohlfahrt’s “The very Private Emperor,”
depict the story of the cousins’ wedding and resulting troubled mar-
riage with some contradicting detail. Lichtscheidl concludes her piece
by suggesting a type of understanding and even happiness between
the royal couple not portrayed in the above-mentioned exhibits: “In
fact, Franz Joseph’s love for his wife never died. The different inter-
ests and assignments of the couple separated them often, but both of
them tried to accept the other’s world. Their relationship was built on
great respect for one another and a deep friendship.”36 Wohlfart’s essay,
which focuses on the differences between Franz Joseph and Elisabeth
and depicts his relationship with two other women, paints a much more
pessimistic picture regarding the nature of the couple’s relationship.37
In “Franz Joseph,” the tragic aspects of Sisi’s life were at times repre-
sented through the implied lens of Franz Joseph’s perspective, thereby
subtly communicating her secondary status as emperor’s wife in his-
tory and in the exhibit. The exhibit, however, also included elements
that contributed to her demystification. The bust “Elisabeth in a cloud,”
for example, introduced the idea of her stylization which began “dur-
ing her lifetime, but did not reach its height until after the end of the
monarchy.”38 Of the four locations, the “People and Ruler” exhibit at
Schloss Schönbrunn allotted the most space and material to Sisi. As
a major milestone in Franz Joseph’s life, his and Elisabeth’s wedding
received attention in the section that also included the wedding jewelry
highlighted by Karl Vocelka.39 A separate section offered a variety of
representations of Sisi in her later life,40 concluding with her death.41
“Franz Joseph” unveiled a slew of elements about the Habsburgs’ last
century by telling the story of the penultimate emperor in its greatest
detail. “Habsburg Splendor,” on the other hand, provided an overview
36 Olivia Lichtscheidl, “Der private Kaiser,” in Franz Joseph 1830–1926, ed. Karl
Vocelka and Martin Mutschelechner (Vienna: Brandstätter, 2016), 71.
37 Michael Wohlfahrt, “Der ganz private Kaiser: Die ausserehelichen Beziehun-
gen Franz Josephs,” in Franz Joseph 1830–1926, ed. Karl Vocelka and Martin
Mutschelechner (Vienna: Brandstätter, 2016), 72–5.
38 “Objects exhibited: Schloss Schönbrunn,” 205.
41 “Objects exhibited: Schloss Schönbrunn,” 206–7.
of some of the main themes within the Habsburg treasures. While the
2016 “Franz Joseph” exhibit spread the experience out over four venues
throughout and beyond the city of Vienna, the “Habsburg Splendor”
exhibit packed six hundred years of Austrian history and culture into
just a few rooms.
Sisi in the United States

While the humanization of the building, art, and artifacts in Vienna
determines one’s experience of the city, the curators of the Kunsthistor-
isches Museum took an alternative approach when conceptualizing the
“Habsburg Splendor” exhibit that was created exclusively for a US audi-
ence in Minneapolis, Houston, and Atlanta. It is noteworthy that the
exhibit was not shipped to larger centers of art that are also supported
by an Austrian Consulate or Cultural Forum like Chicago, Los Angeles,
New York, or Washington DC, but to locations to which the Austrian
government dedicates fewer resources42 and where the pedagogical
impact of Austria’s history might arguably be greater. The exhibited
items are regularly on display in Vienna in the venues of the Kunsthis-
torisches Museum, but not in the same combination or presentation as
in the exhibit for the three US art museums. In “Habsburg Splendor,” the
art and their collectors were the focal point, thereby creating an image
of Vienna as a historical art capital with the Kunsthistorisches Museum
at its center. In his review of “Habsburg Splendor,” James Gardner
observed that “the foremost cultural projection of Habsburg splendor
cannot travel. That is the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the
source of all the objects in the present exhibition.”43 Even a spectator not
familiar with Vienna’s museum culture left the “Habsburg Splendor”
exhibit with the knowledge about the main collectors and regular homes
of the displayed works. Additionally, the first two articles in the catalog,
entitled Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections
at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, depict the history of the Kunsthistor-
isches Museum and the Habsburgs.
The directors of the four museums involved describe the exhibit in
the catalog’s foreword as “presenting an extraordinarily wide-rang-
ing survey of the Habsburgs’ acclaimed collections, including classical
Greek and Roman works, medieval arms and armor, tapestries, Old
Master paintings, exquisite works of decorative art, ceremonial gilded
carriages and sleighs, opulent costumes, and official court uniforms.
Seen together, the collections reveal the pomp and splendor, the regalia
42 Each of the three cities has an Honorary Consul of Austria.

43 James Gardner, “Habsburg Flash And Filigree,” Magazine Antiques January/Feb-
ruary, 2015. Available at: http://themagazineantiques.com/article/habsburg-
flash-and-filigree/ (accessed November 2, 2017).
366 Sissi’s World
and rituals, the prestige and spectacle associated with the Habsburg
rulers.”44 Heidemarie Uhl writes, “The representations of cultural
memory reveal which groups have the power of definition and which
are marginalized and excluded. […] And it is particularly the swift,
temporary medium of exhibition that has the potential to intervene in
existing hierarchies and orders of narratives.”45 The narrative conveyed
is that of Austria’s powerful, extravagant, and rich past. Critics were
quite taken with the exhibit, describing it with such adjectives as aston-
ishing,46 fabulous, and lavish.47 Others noted the educational effects:
“What’s most impressive about the exhibition’s organization is how
easily and simply it tells a complicated story; a robustly comprehensi-
ble narrative inevitably emerges, its odd twists and turns told primarily
through the objects themselves, but also spelled out in more detail in
excellent gallery text and the exhibition catalog.”48
You may have guessed by now that this exhibition is really a

history lesson wrapped in gold and silver. The nature of the objects
changed, but the basic political purpose remained the same: awe
your subjects, your allies and your enemies with magnificence—
but not for its own sake—magnificence projecting power, drama
and excess that they could never hope to equal.49
Referring back to Uhl’s commentary, the curators of the Kunsthistor-

isches Museum who chose the items to be displayed in the US made
44 Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner, Foreword to Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from

Vienna’s Imperial Collections at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, ed. Monica Kurzel-
Runtscheiner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 7.
45 Heidemarie Uhl, “Museums as Engines of Identity: ‘Vienna around 1900’ and
Exhibitionary Cultures in Vienna—A Comment,” Austrian History Yearbook 46
(2015): 98–9.
46 Karen Wilkin, “‘Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Col-
lection’ Review,” The Wall Street Journal August 5, 2015, Available at: http://
www.wsj.com/articles/habsburg-splendor-masterpieces-from-viennas-imperi-
al-collections-review-1438807105 (accessed November 2, 2017).
47 Felicia Feaster, “Review: Lavish Display in High’s ‘Habsburg Splendor’ Rich
In Context,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution October 19, 2015. Available at: http://
www.myajc.com/news/entertainment/arts-theater/review-lavish-display-in-
highs-habsburg-splendor-r/nn5yB/ (accessed November 2, 2017).
48 Andrew Alexander, “Review: ‘Habsburg Splendor’ a Feast of Paintings, Objets
D’art, Royal Transportation, at High Museum,” Artsatl October 23, 2015. Availa-
ble at: http://www.artsatl.com/review-habsburg-splendor/ (accessed Novem-
ber 2, 2017).
49 Randy Tibbits, “‘Habsburg Splendor’ is a History Lesson Wrapped in Gold and
Silver.” Houston Press June 22, 2015. Available at: http://www.houstonpress.
com/arts/habsburg-splendor-is-a-history-lesson-wrapped-in-gold-and-sil-
ver-7532566 (accessed November 2, 2017).
the clear decision to weigh the importance of the collectors over the art-
ists. The catalog’s articles tell the stories of the collection’s growth, the
generations of collectors, and the cultural rituals, rites, and traditions
surrounding them.
The fact that Franz Joseph was not an avid art collector or enthu-
siast rightfully relieved him of attention in this exhibit and catalog.
Still, the marketing material nevertheless devoted some attention to the
emperor and his wife, thereby undermining the attempt at shifting the
focus away from the famous couple. In the introductory articles of the
“Habsburg Splendor” catalog, Empress Elisabeth only finds mention
as “Franz Joseph’s beautiful, and eccentric, wife” who played a lead-
ing role in the formation of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy.50 In
the exhibit, Franz Joseph and Elisabeth were represented via a piece
of attire that could be considered typical for each. The exhibit section
featuring various uniforms also showcased a “Campaign Uniform of
an Imperial and Royal Field Marshal in Hungarian Attire” including
a “tunic worn by Emperor Franz Joseph I.”51 The uniform represented
not only the historical period of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but also
Franz Joseph’s preferred daily attire: “Most of his subjects knew the
emperor from the pale blue campaign uniform that he wore almost
daily and that can also be seen in most of his portraits in later years.”52
The illustration of a 1916 painting of Franz Joseph in a similar uniform
of the same colors was included in the exhibit and served to under-
line this perspective. For Empress Elisabeth, the exhibitors again chose
a “black velvet dress,” this time described as “in the style of Charles
Frederick Worth.”53 Sisi preferred black clothing after the death of her
son Rudolf,54 a fact that is unmentioned in the black dress listings of
either the “Franz Joseph” or “Habsburg Splendor” catalog. According
to the “Habsburg Splendor” description, the dress was chosen because
it reflected the style of the dress Elisabeth wore in the famous 1865 por-
traits painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, notably absent in the cata-
log. Instead, the catalog includes an 1862 painting by Franz Schrotzberg
of “Empress Elisabeth of Austria.”55 This catalog description manages
to summarize the main information conveyed in Vienna’s Sisi Museum
in four short sentences:
She was admired around the world for her exceptional beauty
and for her unconventional style. She was considered the best
50 Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner, Foreword to Habsburg Splendor, 40.

51 “Catalogue,” in Habsburg Splendor, 234–5.
52 “Catalogue,” in Habsburg Splendor, 234.
54 Unterreiner, Sisi: Mythos und Wahrheit, 95.
368 Sissi’s World
par force rider, and her athletic prowess was always a source of
amazement to the gentlemen who accompanied her on hunts
in England and France. Sisi shocked the Viennese court when
she had a fitness room set up in the imperial palace. She wrote
critically ironic poems about the society in which she lived and
spent most of her life traveling.56
Even though both Sisi and Franz Joseph had a singular spot in the
“Habsburg Splendor” exhibit, the stories told in the catalog avoid
drawing a clear connection between the married individuals. Addi-
tionally, in Atlanta’s High Museum at least, the “campaign uniform”
and Sisi’s “black velvet dress” were displayed in separate rooms in
the exhibit, thereby not capitalizing on the story of the royal couple
that draws international attention in Vienna. An uninformed audience
member could easily have passed through without even realizing that
these two individuals were married, unless they were listening to the
exhibition’s audio guide app produced by Acoustiguide, which com-
bined the two objects into one audio segment, albeit concentrating on
the fashion aspect. With respect to Sisi, it discussed her as a fashion icon
and stressed the styling of her waspish waist. Part of the audio guide
was taken directly from the exhibition video “The Habsburgs: Rarely
Seen Masterpieces from Europe’s Greatest Dynasty.”57
Oddly, again, the nearly 12-minute-long version of the PR video
advertising “Habsburg Splendor” could not resist reverting to a narra-
tive that devoted more attention to Sisi than the actual exhibit did. The
video concluded by confusingly highlighting Franz Joseph and Elis-
abeth as central to the last part of the exhibition, as Franz Joseph was
the last significant Habsburg ruler and the builder of the Kunsthistor-
isches Museum. Based on this video, one would have expected a more
in-depth representation in the exhibit of both Franz Joseph and Sisi,
given that they were highlighted as representing the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries to which the “last part of the exhibit is ded-
icated:” “to the rulers of the Habsburg Dynasty, Franz Joseph and his
wife Elisabeth,” in the words of Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner. Kurzel-
Runtscheiner introduced the video and exhibition as telling the “story
of a family who shaped the history of Europe for over 600 years” as
well as “how they used art and artists in order to promote their power,
their image, and themselves as heroes of history.”58 Since neither Franz

57 Minneapolis Institute of Art, “The Habsburgs: Rarely Seen Masterpieces from
Europe’s Greatest Dynasty,” YouTube video 11:50 minutes, posted February
13, 2015. Available at: https://youtu.be/uAr_bK6_6hk (accessed November 2,
2017).
58 Minneapolis Institute of Art, “The Habsburgs: Rarely Seen Masterpieces.”
Joseph nor Elisabeth are known as significant art collectors, it made

sense for them to inhabit a marginal place in the exhibition, which
makes it even more curious that Kurzel-Runtscheiner decided to men-
tion them at length during the video.
The gift shop selection at the High Museum in Atlanta likewise con-
tradicted the actual representation of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth in the
exhibit. While their marriage was downplayed within the exhibit, items
available in the gift shop included the “couples of Vienna: real gold on
porcelain mug,” one with Kaiserin Elisabeth’s (Sisi) and one with Kai-
ser Franz Joseph’s (Franzl) face designed from small golden hearts and
created by a Viennese designer couple, “Das Goldene Wiener Herz”
(DGWH.at). According to the company’s website, the High Museum of
Art in Atlanta sold two of their products during the “Habsburg Splen-
dor” exhibit: the “Vienna couples mugs”59 and “Wiener Heuriger”
wine glasses.60 The other US museums were not listed as merchants of
DGWH’s products, described by the company as
Design from and with Vienna, to give as a gift, to use and to collect
[…] the idea is to establish an individual brand with regionally
manufactured products from the rich fundus of Vienna’s daily
objects and cultural highlights—with a Vienna style, so to speak.
We are always interested in a—the—story behind the product.61
In this case, the DGWH products sold at the High Museum of Art in
Atlanta complemented the story told within the exhibit by filling in its
gaps. The representation of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth as marginal and
unconnected characters in the Habsburg story was undermined by the
“Vienna couples” mug.
The DGWH products market Vienna as an attractive destination at
the same time as they market the Jugendstil style that also has become
a trademark and marketing tool for the city. In an editorial on place
branding, Simon Anholt writes: “Parallels between places and prod-
ucts go back a long way, of course. Places have been promoting their
attractions and their images throughout history […]”62 Anholt studies
59 “Kollektion: Porzellanbecher,” Das Goldene Wiener Herz. Available at: http://

www.dgwh.at/shop/de/Porzellanbecher/Vienna-Couples (accessed Novem-
ber 2, 2017).
60 “Kollektion: Weingläser,” Das Goldene Wiener Herz. Available at: http://www.
dgwh.at/shop/de/Weinglaeser/Wiener-Heuriger (accessed November 2,
2017).
61 “Über uns,” Das Goldene Wiener Herz. Available at: http://www.dgwh.at/ueber-
dgwh/ueber-uns/ (accessed November 2, 2017).
62 Simon Anholt, “Definitions of Place Branding—Working towards a Resolution,”
Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 6 (2010): 1.
370 Sissi’s World
and develops the field of nation branding and argues that a nation’s
success at improving its international image hinges on the production
of good products. The consumers’ respect for any product is, however,
also deeply connected with their perception of the product’s coun-
try of origin. Lee, Lockshin, and Greenacre have demonstrated how
intricately the two are intertwined,63 and Anholt claims that a coun-
try’s products and the formation of its image cannot be elusive, but
must have tangible results. “The message is clear: if a country is serious
about enhancing its international image, it should concentrate on the
national equivalents of ‘product development’ (and the effective and
professional marketing of those ‘products’) rather than chase after the
chimaera of branding.”64 Anholt, of course, refers to more than a series
of mugs designed by a pair of artists, but these ceramics are only one
example of a large number of Vienna- and Habsburg-oriented souvenir
products available mostly at souvenir shops inside, but also outside
of Vienna. Additionally, the “Habsburg Splendor” exhibit itself was a
product marketed to the US audience with the intention of enhancing
Austria’s image.
As the above-mentioned reviews show, the American museumgo-
ers turned out to be an appreciative audience for the type of story the
curators of the Kunsthistorisches Museum decided to tell about Aus-
tria. Anholt advises nation branders to “identify influential target audi-
ences that are actively searching for something, and see whether this
coincides with something the country has to offer.” He identifies “using
positive, direct experience to create an image where there is currently a
mixed or weak image created through indirect experience, and where
there is a good reason to trust in the quality of the direct experience” as
a strategy that is “likely to work.”65 The nearly one hundred carefully
selected works brought to the US in themselves communicated Aus-
tria’s cultural richness, but the clear communication within the exhibit
about the specific institution that sent the items enhanced the message
of their quality and facilitated the audience’s trust in the authenticity of
the objects and the stories presented. The published and posted reviews
stressed foremost the rich history of the dynasty presented to them in
a country that possesses neither the monarchical tradition nor the long
historical background of the Habsburgs.
63 Richard Lee, Larry Lockshin, and Luke Greenacre, “A Memory-Theory Perspec-

tive of Country-Image Formation,” Journal of International Marketing 24, no. 2
(June 2016): 62–70.
64 Anholt, “Definitions of Place Branding—Working towards a Resolution,” 10.
65 Simon Anholt, “‘Is This About Me?’—The Critical Issue of Relevance,” Place
Branding and Public Diplomacy 5 (2009): 257.
However, the American audience is very much exposed to its own

produced stories of romance, love, and drama through its film industry.
Robert Wise’s 1965 film The Sound of Music represents the one dramatic
love story most Americans associate with Austria.66 This film references
a time during which the international image of the US was at its most
prestigious and for which American culture tends to display nostalgia
to this day. Sisi and Franz Joseph’s time, in contrast, coincides with a
historical moment of crisis in the United States. The US education sys-
tem teaches that the latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of
domestic civil war followed by the tense period of rebuilding a coun-
try’s unity. Nostalgia about an Austrian royal ruling couple, or a beau-
tiful but often egotistical empress, is far removed from the associations
Americans make with that time. Presumably deliberately, the curators
decided to leave out Sisi and Franz Joseph’s complex stories, consider-
ing the limits of Americans’ ability to relate to their context (especially
in a location like Atlanta, which is filled with historical sites related to
the civil war). In accordance with Anholt’s theory, the exhibit sought
to solidify Austria’s image as a historically powerful and culturally
rich country, an image most Americans like to associate with their own
country and to which they can therefore relate. The average Ameri-
can simply does not have extensive knowledge about Austria’s role in
European history. The approach taken by the curators of the Kunsthis-
torisches Museum, then, was to offer the American audience a story it
could understand filled with a long history it does not possess itself.
The purpose of the exhibit was to educate, impress, and excite, which,
according to the reviews, it succeeded in doing.
The “Franz Joseph” and “Habsburg Splendor” exhibits were con-
ceived for different audiences and more so with the intent of conveying
different messages. Both tried to marginalize Sisi by granting her one or
a few nods within the displays, but without diverting extensive atten-
tion to her unique story as Empress of Austria. According to Stephan
Löwenstein’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung contribution about the
opening of the “Franz Joseph” exhibit, Sisi’s limited presence foremost
spoke to the Viennese audience, who not only continues to be drawn to
the former emperor, but who must embrace him as part of their contem-
porary cultural life: “Where the Viennese go, it is not Sisi who is pres-
ent, but the Emperor Franz Joseph […] The entire Ringstrasse, which
surrounds the city center, is one commemoration mile of Emperor
Franz Joseph.”67 “Franz Joseph,” thus, not only served to renew interest
66 The Sound of Music, directed by Robert Wise (1964, Los Angeles: Twentieth Cen-
tury Fox Film Corporation).
67 Stephan Löwenstein, “Franz Joseph I. von Österreich: Der ewige Kaiser,” Frank-
furter Allgemeine, March 26, 2016.
372 Sissi’s World
in the last phase of the Habsburg Monarchy, but to establish a personal

connection between visitor and the man at its center. Standing in the
locations the emperor once stood, the visitors’ gaze moved beyond the
historical into the romantic or nostalgic. The experience of the Ameri-
can audience, on the other hand, was naturally much less personal, and
lacked the geographical and temporal connection between visitor and
artifacts. In Houston, Minneapolis, and Atlanta, the items on display
told a much broader story about the cultural power of a European rul-
ing house.
Both exhibits fulfilled a mission in Vienna’s city branding but
offered the visitors a different experience and diverging images. The
four locations of “Franz Joseph,” next to the complementary exhibits
and displays around town, provided the visitor with a puzzle s/he had
to put together her- or himself to gain the complete and big picture.
“Habsburg Splendor” aimed to awe the American audience with the
kind of opulent history it does not possess itself. The visitors’ quest
was one of time, moving through a slew of centuries in the attempt to
grasp the key players in Austria’s and Europe’s (art) historical story.
The strategy of big picture presentation within a compact space, how-
ever, left out a few details that might have facilitated the drawing of the
kind of connections of which the Viennese audience was cognizant. Pre-
cisely because Sisi was not a focal point in either of these exhibits, the
extent to which she was featured in marketing or commercial materials
revealed her as a sign of a city image that cannot, or perhaps does not
want to be changed. Even though Sisi spent much of her life as empress
avoiding the city of Vienna, the myth of her eternal presence is contin-
uously rewritten. As the marketing materials surrounding “Habsburg
Splendor” and “Franz Joseph” demonstrated, Vienna’s cultural insti-
tutions, such as Vienna Tourism, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and
Schloss Schönbrunn continue to preserve “Sisi’s Vienna,” at times even
subconsciously in instances when she appears in the midst of presenta-
tions about alternative aspects of Vienna’s history and culture. In spite
of the efforts to refine the Habsburg story with more and possibly truer
details, to some degree, Vienna remains “Sisi’s Vienna.”
Bibliography
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Notes on Contributors
Elizabeth Black is Associate Professor of French in the Department of

World Languages and Cultures at Old Dominion University in Norfolk,
Virginia. Her areas of expertise include French Renaissance literature,
visual culture, and architectural treatises, as well as cinema studies.
Her articles explore secret space in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron
(1558), digitization of the French emblem corpus, mirrors and windows
in Gilles Corrozet’s Blasons domestiques (1539), gender and law in Pierre
Coustau’s Pegme (1560), gendered space and domesticity in French
emblem books, and the toilet in the French sixteenth-century imagi-
nary. She is completing a manuscript on secrecy and domestic space in
literary, visual, and architectural texts of sixteenth-century France. She
currently serves as Treasurer and Membership Secretary for the Inter-
national Society for Emblem Studies, Discipline Representative for the
Society for Emblem Studies at the Renaissance Society of America, and
Executive Committee Member for the French Sixteenth-Century Forum
of the MLA.
Olivia Gruber Florek is Assistant Professor of Art History at Delaware

County Community College in Media, Pennsylvania. Her research
examines the relationship between celebrity and nineteenth-century
female portraiture, the subject of a work-in-progress entitled, The Celeb-
rity Beauty: Empress Elisabeth and the Modern Female Portrait. Her pub-
lications include the essay “The Absent Empress: Photomontage, the
Habsburg Monarchy, and Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century” that
appeared in Representing the Habsburg-Lorraine Dynasty in Music, Visual
Media, and Architecture, ca. 1618–1918 (Böhlau 2017).
Maura E. Hametz is Professor of History at Old Dominion University

in Norfolk, Virginia. Her research explores the history of Trieste and
the northeastern Adriatic regions since the late nineteenth century
with emphasis on the intersections of politics, culture, economy, law,
376 Notes on Contributors
religion, gender, and ethnic and national identity. Her most recent book,
In the Name of Italy (Fordham U. Press, 2012), explores nationalist nam-
ing in the Adriatic in the wake of the Habsburg collapse and the judicial
system and justice in Fascist Italy. She also co-edited Jewish Intellectual
Women in Europe, 1860–2000: Twelve Biographical Essays (Edwin Mellen
Press, 2012). She is now working on projects on citizenship in the Adri-
atic provinces in the interwar period, and on No Grounds to Proceed, a
monograph that examines Mussolini’s Special Tribunal for the Defense
of the State.
Christiane Hertel is Research Professor in History of Art at Bryn Mawr

College. Her research focuses on the arts of Northern Europe especially
in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands from the Reformation to
the twenty-first century. Her interests in visual and literary reception
history as well as aesthetics and art theory have informed numerous
publications involving their interplay, including her recent monograph
Pygmalion in Bavaria: Ignaz Günther (1725–1775) and Eighteenth-Century
Aesthetic Art Theory (Penn State University Press, 2011).
Susanne Hochreiter is Senior Researcher in German Studies at the Uni-

versity of Vienna. She studied German philology, history of art, philos-
ophy, psychology, and education at the University of Vienna and the
Free University Berlin, receiving her PhD from the University of Vienna
in 2003. Hochreiter has served as Visiting Professor at the University
of Bern (2001), at Wake Forest University (2007–08), and as Max Kade
Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(2015). From 2010 to 2013 she was a faculty member of the inter- and
transdisciplinary Doctorate Program (Initiativkolleg) focusing on “Gen-
der, Violence and Agency in the Era of Globalization” at the University
of Vienna. Her research interests include German literature from the
nineteenth century to the present, contemporary Austrian literature,
gender in literature, queer readings, media theory, performance and
performativity, theater, dance, and space, and comic and graphic nov-
els. Her major publications include: Franz Kafka: Raum und Geschlecht
(Königshausen & Neumann, 2007) and Queer Reading in den Philologien,
co-edited with Anna Babka (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008). Other
co-edited collections include Bild ist Text ist Bild: Narration und Ästhe-
tik in der Graphic Novel with Ursula Klingenböck (transcript, 2014);
Inter*geschlechtliche Körperlichkeiten. Diskurs/Begegnungen im Erzähltext
with Angelika Baier (Zaglossus, 2014); and Mann, Männer, Männlich-
keiten. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven with Silvia Stoller (Präsens, 2017).
Ke-Chin Hsia is Lecturer in the Department of History, Indiana Univer-

sity Bloomington. He is a social and political historian of late Imperial
Austria and the Austrian Republic, with special interests in the welfare
state, bureaucracy, democratization, citizenship, national identities, and
disability. He is completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Victims’
State: War and Welfare in Austria, 1868–1925, which uses the politics of
welfare for war victims to examine how the Austrian state and society
tackled the consequences of soldiering in an era of universal military
service, democratizing political culture, and totalizing war mobiliza-
tion. His publications include “Who Provided Care for Wounded and
Disabled Soldiers? Conceptualizing State–Civil Society Relationship
in WWI Austria” (2014) and, with Fei-Hsien Wang, “Austrian Studies
with ‘Chinese Characteristics?’ Some Observations” (2011). His other
ongoing projects focus on the internal colonization schemes in WWI
Austria and the politics of asylum and policing in post-WWI Vienna.
Susanne Kelley was Associate Professor of German at Kennesaw State

University until 2017. She now teaches German language and integra-
tion courses in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. She has published arti-
cles about the art, literature, and culture of the Viennese fin-de-siècle,
on tourism and travel texts as well as on city marketing. In 2015, she
received the AATG Post-Secondary Outstanding German Educator
Award.
Borut Klabjan is Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the European Uni-

versity Institute in Florence and Senior Research Fellow at the Science
and Research Centre in Koper. He graduated from the University of
Trieste and received his PhD degree from the University of Ljubljana.
He studied at universities in Bratislava, Prague, and Venice, and in 2011
he was Humboldt Fellow at the Institute for South-East Europe at the
Humboldt University in Berlin. He is the author of two monographs,
editor of four multilingual volumes, and the author of numerous articles
published in East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, Nationali-
ties Papers, Annales, Acta Histriae, Austrian History Yearbook, Qualestoria,
Historický časopis, and Zgodovinski časopis. He has organized workshops
and international conferences and is a participant in several national
and international projects treating the themes of political, diplomatic,
and cultural history as well as memory, border, and minority issues in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.
András Lénárt received his PhD in History at ELTE, Budapest in 2010.

He is Research Fellow at the 56 Institute – Oral History Archive of
the National Széchényi Library. He participated in the public history
projects “Yellow-Star Houses” (2014) and “Budapest100” (2011) at the
Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives of CEU, Budapest. He
has published extensively on the 1956 emigration from Hungary, the
surveillance of former members of the Arrow Cross Party, as well as on

cultural dissidents and the Jewish community during the Communist
era. He is currently working on the history of Jewish Boy Scouts after
WWII. His recent publications include “The Legacy of World War II and
Belated Justice in the Hungarian Films of the early Kádár Era,” Hun-
garian Historical Review (2017); “Perek. A holokauszt tematizálásának
példái a hatvanas évek magyarországi nyilvánosságában” (“Trials:
The Holocaust in public discourses in 1960s Hungary”), in A forradalom
ígérete? Történelmi és nyelvi események kereszteződései (The Promise of the
revolution. Crossings of historical and linguistic events) (Ráció, 2014); and,
with Éva Kovács and Anna L. Szász, “Oral History Collections on the
Holocaust in Hungary,” S: i. M. O. N, the e-Journal of Wiener Wiesenthal
Instituts für Holocaust Studien (VWI) (2014). He is a 2018 fellow at the
Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Stud-
ies at the USHMM.
Carolin Maikler currently works as a pattern maker at Akris in Swit-

zerland. She completed her apprenticeship at Polimoda Fashion School
in Florence. Maikler studied Germanic and Italian languages and lit-
eratures in Freiburg, Florence, and Vienna and earned her PhD under
the supervision of Professor Achim Aurnhammer in Freiburg. For her
thesis on Empress Elisabeth as a literary myth, she received the Uni-
versity of Freiburg’s Gerhart-Baumann Prize in 2010. Maikler studies
German literature of the early twentieth century, Jewish culture, and
fashion history, but her main focus is on the Sisi cult in its diverse man-
ifestations. Her doctoral work included the production of a copy of
an embroidered shawl, which is part of Empress Sisi’s elaborate and
famous engagement dress (“Polterabendkleid”) on display at the Kun-
sthistorisches Museum in Vienna. She edited Arthur Schnitzler’s film
script Liebelei, published in the Freiburg volume of Schnitzler’s film
works. For the recent edition of the Killy Literaturlexikon Maikler wrote
articles on Hans Grasberger, Marie Elisabeth Grube, and Theodor von
Heussenstamm.
Anita McChesney is Assistant Professor of German at Texas Tech Uni-

versity. She received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University with
a dissertation on constructions of probability and truth in detective nar-
ratives from Heinrich von Kleist to Gerhard Roth. She has published
widely on German and Austrian crime fiction and on the intersection of
media, myth, and history in contemporary Austrian literature. Recent
articles include “Mediating and Remediating Reality: The Evolution of
Myth in Ransmayr’s Der fliegende Berg,” Gegenwartsliteratur: A German
Studies Yearbook (2016) and “The Second History of National Socialism
in Contemporary Austrian Crime Fiction,” Colloquia Germanica (2013).
She is currently working on a project that considers contemporary Aus-

trian crime fiction as a tool for socio-historical critique.
Beth Ann Muellner is Associate Professor of German and Chair of the

German and Russian Studies Department at the College of Wooster,
where she has taught language and culture since 2004. She is also an
affiliate faculty member in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and
is currently serving as the president of The Coalition of Women in Ger-
man (2016–2018). Muellner earned her BA (1988) and PhD (2003) from
the University of Minnesota, and her MA (1995) from the University
of Maryland, College Park. From 1988 to 1992, she studied Germanistik
and completed her Zwischenprüfung at the Freie Universität in Berlin.
Her dissertation explored German women’s travel from 1850 to 1930.
Her research focuses on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
women’s writing, travel writing, as well as feminist theory, visual cul-
ture, and interdisciplinary approaches to literature. She also works on
literary conceptions of space, the history of photography, early film,
and aristocratic history. Her current project is entitled Working the
Gilded Cage: Performances, Photographs, and Texts of Carmen Sylva. She
co-edited New Perspectives in German Women’s Writing and the Spatial
Turn with Carola Daffner (DeGruyter, 2015). Other recent publications
include “Roving Reporter, Traveling Journalist, Storyteller: Annemarie
Schwarzenbach (1908–1942),” in Discovering Women’s History: German
Women Journalists (Lang, 2014); “Nineteenth-Century German Women
Writers on the Railroad,” in Trains, Literature and Culture. Reading and
Writing the Rails (Lexington, 2011); “The Walled-Up Wife Speaks Out:
The Balkan ‘Legend of the Walled-Up Wife’ and Carmen Sylva’s Meister
Manole,” forthcoming in Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies
(2018).
Heidi Schlipphacke is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies and

Classics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses
on issues of gender, kinship, and aesthetics in the German Enlight-
enment, in post-WWII German and Austrian literature and film, and
in Critical Theory and queer theory. She also enjoys writing on pop-
ular culture. She has published in journals including Screen, The
Journal of English and German Philology, The German Quarterly, Orbis
Litterarum, and Camera Obscura. Her book, Nostalgia After Nazism:
History, Home and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film,
appeared with Bucknell University Press in 2010. Her research has
been funded by the Fulbright Foundation and by the Deutscher Akad-
emischer Austauschdienst. She edited a special issue of the Journal of
Austrian Studies on the topic of “Habsburg Nostalgia” (2014). She is
currently working on a monograph on eighteenth-century German
literature and thought entitled The Aesthetics of Kinship. A co-edited spe-

cial volume of the Lessing Yearbook on sexualities in the eighteenth cen-
tury appeared in 2017.
Judith Szapor teaches Modern European History at the Department of

History and Classical Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Can-
ada. Her research interests include the social, intellectual, and gender
history of Hungary in the early twentieth century and the history of
the intellectual migration from Central Europe. She is the author of The
Hungarian Pocahontas: The Life and Times of Laura Polanyi Stricker, 1884–
1959 (Columbia UP, 2005) and Hungarian Women’s Activism in the Wake
of the First World War; From Rights to Revanche (Bloomsbury Academic,
forthcoming 2018), as well as co-editor of Jewish Intellectual Women in
Central Europe: Twelve Biographical Essays (Edwin Mellen Press, 2012) and
co-editor of a special issue of The Hungarian Studies Review on “Gender
and Nation” (2014). Other recent publications include “Feminists vs.
‘good Hungarian women:’ Rosika Schwimmer and the Women’s Debat-
ing Club in 1918–1919 Hungary,” Women’s History Review (2017); with
Julie Gottlieb, “Suffrage and Nationalism in Comparative Perspective:
Britain, Hungary, and Finland” in Women’s Movements and Female Activ-
ists in the Aftermath of WWI (Bloomsbury, 2017); “Private archives and
public lives; The migrations of Alexander Weissberg and the Polanyi
archives,” Jewish Culture and History (2014); and “The Generation of
‘Bright Winds:’ A Generation Denied” in History by Generations; Genera-
tional Dynamics in Modern History (Wallstein, 2013).
Kate Thomas is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Bryn Mawr

College. Her research interests span Victorian literature and culture,
materialism, queer studies, and food studies. She is the author of Postal
Pleasures: Sex, Sandal and Victorian Letters (Oxford UP, 2012) and is work-
ing on a new book project Victorians Fat and Thin on food and class in the
age of mechanical reproduction. She has published widely on Victorian
literature and temporalities and on queer theory in journals including
South Atlantic Quarterly and GLQ (Gay and Lesbian Quarterly).
Fei-Hsien Wang is Assistant Professor of History, East Asian Languages

and Cultures and the Liberal Arts & Management Program, at Indiana
University Bloomington. She is also a research associate of the Centre
for History and Economics at Cambridge University. She is a historian
of modern China, with particular interests in information production,
law, and economic life. Her research has revolved around the relation-
ship between knowledge, commerce, and political authority in mod-
ern East Asia, especially China. Her book Hunting Pirates in the Middle
Kingdom: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China (forthcoming,
Princeton University Press) explores how copyright was understood,

appropriated, codified, and, most importantly, practiced by Chinese as
a new legal doctrine. Her first book, Periodicals, Publishing, and Socio-cul-
tural Transformation: Commercial Press and “Students’ Magazine” during the
May Fourth Era (in Chinese, 2004), illustrates how, while a leading print
capitalist in China promoted and exploited the intellectual agendas of
the May Fourth New Cultural Movement for profit, its market-driven
editorial reform also provided underground communists an ideal plat-
form for marketing their socialist revolution. She has published articles
in Chinese and English on subjects such as the wartime political dic-
tionary, Shanghai publishers’ self-regulation mechanism, and the inter-
dependency between Chinese copyright pirates and Anglo-American
companies in the globalizing textbook market.
Index
Abbé Pierre 6 artifacts 7, 24, 57, 58, 60, 70, 72, 77,
absence 42–3, 57, 62 n.40, 63, 70–8, 78, 113, 159, 215, 230, 357,
139, 266, 345, 364 360, 365, 372
Achilleion Palace 10, 16, 17, 123, Athena, Goddess of Wisdom 34,
158, 160, 162 110
Achilles 161, 162, 168 audience 2, 21–22, 35, 38, 43, 123,
Adorno, Theodor 5 n.15 160, 170, 172, 183–5, 185 n.9,
Adriatic Littoral 104–6, 115 186, 191, 194, 197, 198, 209,
aesthetics 60, 204, 215, 219, 220, 216–18, 222, 223, 229, 237,
222, 223, 376 239, 247, 310, 311, 317–18,
camp 19, 64, 82, 215, 220, 222–3, 357, 359, 368, 370–72
229, 243, 253–4 audio guide/acoustic guide 62–4,
AIDS 237, 237 n.54, 328 361, 362, 368
Albert, Prince of Wales 141, 324 Auermann, Nadja 158, 161
allegory 126, 166, 222, 239, 243, Ausgleich (1867) 44, 193
247, 263, 264, 269, 270 Austria 3, 7, 12, 14, 16, 18–20, 22,
Allied Military Government 23, 39, 43, 47, 83, 90–2, 117,
(Trieste) 114 122, 123, 125, 126, 143 n.28,
Althorp 329, 330, 343 n.93 170, 172, 181 n.1, 191, 192,
Althusser, Louis 358 198, 215–18, 220, 221, 233,
Amethyst Album 134–7, 140, 142, 235–8, 248, 253, 258, 259,
143, 148 275–80, 284–6, 291 n.57, 292,
Anderson, Benedict 276–7 293–9, 317, 347, 357, 365,
Andrássy, Gyula (Count) 23 n.79, 366, 370–2
89 n.21, 193, 196–97, 218, Austro-Hungarian monarchy. See
235–6, 240, 243, 255 Habsburg dual monarchy
Anholt, Simon 369–70 avatar 98–100, 348, 349
animalism 337
anti-monarchists 105 Bad Ischl 22 n.77, 116, 205, 231
architecture 11, 69, 74, 285, 305 n.17 Badeau-Päun, Gabriel 147
archive 72, 93, 327 Baidu 182, 189 n.21, 202 n.59, 202
Arnold, Matthew 346 n.60
Index 383
Balzec, Dario 121 House of 158, 169 n.55, 170,

Barthes, Roland 5, 23 n.80, 255 173, 176
n.37 Chaplin, Geraldine 5 n.13, 170
Bavaria 17, 22 n.72, 36, 83, 114, charisma 4, 16, 18
199, 225, 250 China, People’s Republic of 13, 16,
Beauty Albums/Books 134, 138 18, 55 n.7, 181–210
Beijing, Palace Museum of 195–6 Christomanos, Constantin 53 n.1,
Benjamin, Walter 4–5, 11, 14, 55, 157, 160, 161, 166
57, 58, 65 n.48, 75, 76 cinema 55, 56, 58, 66, 183–5, 215, 216,
biography 1, 15, 35, 43, 84, 91, 223, 226, 242, 301, 303, 309
95, 156, 250, 255, 257, 259, n.36, 310, 311, 313, 318, 344
261, 263, 275, 294 n.74, 326, Clark, T.J. 135, 137, 143, 151
330–3, 337, 338, 347, 348 classicism 295
Birbaum, Günter 123 n.79, 124–5 closet (metaphor) 267–70
Black Empress 156, 166, 177 Cocteau, Jean 16, 301–21
Bloch-Bauer, Adele 150, 151 Cold War 18, 83, 103, 114, 115, 117,
Böckl, Colonel 228, 251 122
body culture 363, 364 comedy/comédie 251, 306, 307
Bohemia 111, 280, 285, 286, 294 commercialization 202, 204, 209,
Boym, Svetlana 14, 54 n.4, 57 n.15, 210
57 n.16, 59, 60, 62 communism 83, 90, 93, 94
Braidotti, Rosi 328, 334 n.52 consumerism 13, 90, 198, 200, 201,
Braudy, Leo 137 n.8, 149 209, 210, 291 n.57, 370
Brewster, Ben 303, 307 n.27 Coos, Masimiliano 121, 122
Bronfen, Elisabeth 70, 71, 255–7, 262 Corfu 9–11, 16, 17, 107, 123, 158–62,
Brown, Tom 226–7, 234, 235, 303, 177, 218, 228, 229, 234, 235
307 n.27, 318 corporeality 55, 67, 72, 77
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 323, Corti, Egon 1, 43, 49 n.52, 278 n.9,
331, 345 n.107, 350 278 n.10, 288
Brunner, Andreas 249, 250 costume 5, 20, 21, 43, 81, 82, 93
Budapest 10, 23 n.79, 44 n.42, 81, n.38, 95, 126, 143, 145, 147,
86, 89, 93, 94, 96, 104, 210 172, 183, 200, 202–04, 235,
Butler, Judith 254, 258 324, 365
Croatia 103 n.2, 117, 120, 122
camp. See aesthetics Cultural Revolution 183, 184, 199,
Carducci, Giosué 121, 163 n.33 208
cartes de visite 57 n.15, 134, 137, 138 Cunliffe-Owen, Marguerite 15, 332
Cartland, Barbara 17 n.56, 23 n.78, n.39, 333 n.41, 334 n.50, 335
330–8, 349, 350 n.122 n.54, 337, 338, 347, 348, 350
Catholicism 23, 24 n.124
Central Europe 17, 23, 24, 89, 103, Czech Republic 128, 198
110, 117–23, 124–8, 191, 194, Czechoslovakia 90, 128
198, 199
Chanel, Coco 23 n.77, 157 n.10, Damiani, Roberto 118, 119
167–71, 174–6 Decadent Movement 156, 166
384 Index
Delevingne, Cara 5 n.13, 159, 169 as consort 3, 3 n.6, 13, 24, 111,
n.53, 169 n.55, 170 134, 137, 142, 143, 145, 147
Diana, Princess 11, 20, 21, 24, 56 contests 95, 126
n.14, 71, 155 n.1, 219, 279 corsets 49, 70–2, 77, 334, 336
n.13, 328–30, 332, 334, 343, cult 2, 11, 44 n.42, 56 n.14, 67,
347, 350 73, 82–100, 156, 177, 359
Dickens, Charles 345, 346 death mask 54, 62, 65 n.48
disidentification 250, 256, 257 diet 16, 24, 68, 82, 107, 126, 262,
Döberl, Mario 362, 363 264, 278
drag 219, 229–32, 243, 247, 251, eccentricity 74, 155, 193, 278,
254, 259 367
Dreiansichtigkeit 33, 35–8, 45, 48 equestrian 55, 70
exercise 16, 82, 107, 126, 149,
The Eagle Has Two Heads 16, 301–21 278, 283, 324, 342
Eastern Europe 128, 184 fan 38, 45, 46, 48, 62, 62 n.40, 65,
Edelman, Lee 217, 236 n.48, 238, 75, 134, 147, 155, 267, 281,
241, 252 n.21, 253 n.26 316, 334
Edinost 105, 106, 112 n.31 hair 6, 7, 49, 53 n.1, 60, 61, 70,
Elisabeth, Empress of Austria 77, 126, 131, 147, 148, 150,
anorexia 219 164, 165, 172, 219, 292, 293,
assassination 10, 12, 40, 49, 55, 314, 333, 346–8
62 n.40, 71, 73 n.82, 81, 104, horses 7, 16, 23, 44, 55, 126, 224,
105, 107, 111, 155, 160, 263, 226, 305, 319, 337, 348
275, 288, 329 illness/malady 18, 134, 139,
beauty 1, 9, 16, 20, 22, 60, 61, 228, 237, 290, 332
70, 86, 95, 107, 118, 125, 131, image 1, 2, 4 n.7, 13, 18, 58,
139, 141, 149, 155, 156, 159, 60, 65, 74, 75, 82, 83, 86,
161, 162, 165 n.40, 177, 186, 94, 104, 114, 125, 145, 150,
187, 202, 203, 219, 248, 249, 156–7, 159, 166–7, 176, 177,
255, 261, 262, 264, 267, 278, 192, 197, 249, 252, 260, 261,
280–4, 286, 291–3, 327, 329, 265–9, 275–9, 281, 282, 284,
339, 340, 359, 364, 367 286, 288–90, 292–4, 297–9,
body 17, 57, 61 n.35, 68, 71, 148, 321, 327, 334, 339, 355, 358–9
149, 264, 266, 267, 334 martyrdom 15, 83, 87, 337
as caged bird 9, 224, 225, 227, mater dolorosa 9, 255, 261, 262,
331, 336, 337 350 n.122
as celebrity monarch 11, 86, 87, melancholia/depression 24,
131, 149, 346 56, 107, 150, 177, 219, 222,
clothing 8, 9, 38, 43, 46, 62, 237–8, 350, 359
62 n.40, 66, 72, 77, 81, 98, naturalness 6–8, 223, 224–5,
99, 131, 147, 148, 151, 159, 230, 333
164–7, 172, 173, 229, 230, obsession 16, 17, 126, 219, 267,
263, 267, 280, 281, 287, 291, 283, 359
311, 314, 319, 324, 332 n.41, phenomenon 2, 4, 84, 86, 89,
349, 363, 367, 368, 378 182, 247–50, 257
Index 385
photographs 38, 58, 65, 70, 73, n.41, 70, 71, 77, 78, 88, 94,
97, 131, 138–40, 143, 144 96–8, 100, 118, 122–6, 134
contemporary photographic n.5, 141, 143, 148, 150, 158,
interpretations by Lagerfeld 159 n.16, 163 n.32, 194–8,
155–77 248, 254, 279 n.13, 334, 335,
Sisi-inspired photography in 339, 340 n.82, 342 n.90,
China 201, 260, 266, 267, 355–72
275, 327, 334–6 Exposition Universelle 109 n.21,
princess 21, 68, 71, 118, 125 141
as “Chinese princess”
182–210, 215, 216, 247, Facebook 55, 56, 61, 72 n.79, 75,
254, 325, 331 n.32 76, 248
sexuality 6, 61 n.35, 71, 95, 142, fairytale 127, 186 n.11, 188, 216,
269 237, 243, 331 n.32
as tomboy 231 n.42, 291, 336, Falkenhausen, Susanne von 263, 264
348 Faschinger, Lilian 16, 275–99
veil 266–7, 269, 281, 284, 308 fashion 5, 9, 10, 16, 49, 60, 87, 95,
n.28, 310, 311, 319, 336 122, 125, 126, 155, 159 n.16,
waistline 61 n.35, 70, 72, 98, 163, 167, 169, 170, 173, 174,
149, 167, 324, 363, 368 176, 177, 202, 206, 248, 341,
as white fairy 156, 177 368
Elisabetta 123 fat studies 324, 325 n.6
statue 5, 103–28 Fateful Years of An Empress 18,
Eliszabeth bridge 86, 89 185, 186, 215, 218, 219, 228,
Elsaesser, Thomas 224, 225 231–4, 237–9, 243, 244
empire 7, 9–16, 19, 24, 41, 43, femininity 6, 8, 16, 18, 72, 131, 138,
87, 92, 103, 104, 107, 109, 139, 142, 150–2, 187, 230,
118, 121, 124, 127, 150, 169, 235, 252, 259, 262, 266, 267,
183, 187, 188, 192, 193, 195, 269, 293
206, 207, 215, 218, 232, 248, feminism 15, 56 n.14
260, 261, 264, 276, 280, 281, fetish 6, 7, 7 n.22, 20, 24, 60, 126,
283–6, 288–90, 292, 317, 327, 169 n.54, 186 n.10, 239, 288,
334, 367 344
Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her film 1, 8 n.25, 18–21, 61, 63, 64,
Ladies-in-Waiting 136, 140, 75 n.89, 91, 91 n.28, 155–77,
141 182–9, 192, 194, 201, 205,
Enlightenment 8, 36, 242 215–44, 247–70, 248, 249,
entelechy 49 276, 279, 279 n.12, 291, 291
eroticism 140 n.18, 141, 143, 144, 165 n.57, 301–21, 332–3 n.41, 371
Erzsébet 2, 87 Florinda 136, 140, 141
Eugénie, Empress of France 136, Foucault, Michel 267, 270 n.98
140–2, 145–8, 275 “Franz Joseph” (exhibit) 356, 357,
European Union 92, 96, 124 361, 362, 364–9, 371, 372
exhibits 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 23, 40, 41–2 Franz Joseph I, Emperor of
n.31, 47, 54, 57, 58, 60, 63 Austria 2, 12, 14, 18, 20, 21
386 Index
n.70, 22, 23 n.79, 68, 104 n.3, Gödöllö Royal Palace 7, 8, 55, 81,
107, 111, 116, 125, 131, 132, 88
134, 141, 145, 149, 150, 169, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 37,
170, 174, 175, 191–3, 196, 163
199, 201, 202, 205, 216–9, Goffmann, Erving 67 n.58
226, 227, 231, 233–5, 237–40, Gone With the Wind 226, 227
332–3, 356–9, 361–4, 367, 371 Göttler, Fritz 250
uniform 150, 363, 367, 368 graphic novels 23 n.77, 157 n.6,
Franz Stephan, Holy Roman 229, 230
Emperor 45, 142 n.28 Grassalkovich, Antal 96
Freeman, Elizabeth 236, 252, 253 family 96, 100
Freifeld, Alice 11, 83 n.5, 85–7 Greek mythology 163, 177, 266
Freud, Sigmund 7, 7 n.22, 17, 220, grotesque 70, 72, 259, 313
221 n.10, 222, 249, 294, 344 Günther, Ignaz 35–6
n.102
Habsburg monarchy 3, 10, 13, 17,
Gallery of Beauties 139, 144 21, 68, 70, 90, 104, 106, 108,
gaze 41, 66, 115, 143–5, 147, 151, 117, 121, 122, 131, 156, 196,
163, 235, 269, 293, 303, 232, 361, 372
306–8, 318–20, 325, 335, 336, court life 6, 15, 23, 107, 192, 333
348, 356–8, 362, 372 dual monarchy 8, 86, 88, 193,
gender 8–10, 16, 19, 57 n.14, 104, 196, 217, 248, 367
175, 177, 234, 235, 248, 250, house of 42, 70, 111, 195
251, 254, 256–8, 262, 267, Habsburg, Otto von 92
282, 286, 288, 289, 295, 298, “Habsburg Splendor” 356, 357,
299, 325 364, 365, 367–72
Geneva 55, 56, 81, 104, 155, 219, hairstyle 60, 61, 126, 165, 259
260, 315, 329, 338 Halberstam, Judith (Jack) 236, 237
Germany 19, 20, 22, 39, 83, 159 n.54, 252 n.21
n.16, 198, 215, 216–8, 220, Halbwachs, Maurice 4, 5, 7
221, 233, 235, 238, 253, 279 Hall, Stuart 277, 281, 283, 284, 286
n.12 n.41, 289, 292
Germany (West), Federal Republic Hallam, Lynne 276, 292 n.62, 293
of 216–18 n.66, 294 n.72, 294 n.74,
Gerz, Jochen and Esther Shalev 296 n.86, 297, 298 n.97, 298
34, 35 n.100
ghosting 70, 73 Hamann, Brigitte 65, 68, 91 n.26,
gift shop 74, 82, 369 134 n.3, 134 n.5, 138 n.10,
Gisela of Austria, Archduchess 9, 139, 140 n.17, 150 n.47, 150
111, 331, 332 n.48, 156, 162 n.27, 167 n.49,
Glanstätten, August Albert von 173 n.61, 176 n.67, 263, 278
107 n.8, 278 n.10, 279 n.13, 316,
Glyptothek (Munich) 95–8, 109–10 324 n.3, 324 n.4, 327 n.19,
Gödöllö Museum 82, 83, 95–8 339, 340
Index 387
Hardy, Thomas 338–42 Johnson, Julie 359, 360 n.19

He Rong 191, 192 Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor
Heimat 14–15, 215, 216 111, 114
Heimatfilm 216, 217, 219, 225–6, Jugendstil 109, 127, 369
229, 233, 234
Hein, Hilde 54, 56 n.12, 56 n.14, Kádár, János 89, 91, 92, 98, 378
57–9, 62 n.39, 69 n.62 Kafka, Franz 15
Herbig, Michael “Bully” 19 n.61, Kaiserliche Wagenburg 356, 363
229 n.40, 251, 258, 259 Karlskirche 40–1, 47
Hermes Villa 38–40, 316 kitsch 1, 16, 177, 216, 219
High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Klimt, Gustav 150–1
Georgia) 7, 9, 16, 41 Knappitsch, Evelyn 260, 261 n.58,
Hofburg Palace 41, 42, 53, 57, 261 n.60, 264 n.71, 264 n.72
68–9, 74, 78, 131, 149, 181, König, Ralf 229 n.41, 320
198, 249, 279 n.13, 282, 359 Kroenig, Hudson 174, 176
Hofmobiliendepot 356, 362 Kunsthistorisches Museum 41,
Hollywood 19, 20, 183, 184 132, 133, 314 n.43, 356, 360,
Holocaust 34, 40, 73 n.82, 91, 243 365, 366, 368, 370–2
homosexuality 223, 254, 265, 268, Kurzel-Runtscheiner, Monica
270 360 n.24, 366 n.44, 367 n.50,
Horthy, Miklós (Admiral) 82, 88, 368–9
93, 97, 98, 100 Kuttenberg, Eva 276, 280 n.14, 286
Houston 356, 365, 372 n.39, 287, 290 n.52, 291 n.57,
Hummel, Teodoro 109 298 n.100
Hungarian National Museum 94,
96, 195 La Scala 231–3
Hungary 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 20, 21, 23 Lacan, Jacques 221
n.79, 24, 44–6, 55 n.8, 55 n.9, Lagerfeld, Karl 5, 10, 16, 155–77,
76 n.93, 81–100 202
Revolution of 1848 83, 96, 192 language 11, 23 n.77, 33, 37, 48,
Uprising of 1958 93, 217 53, 60, 64, 65, 67, 75 n.89, 77,
hypertext 256, 257 105, 119, 135, 160, 190, 191,
hysteria 17, 261 218, 234, 265, 285
Laocoön 36, 37
iconicity 49, 216, 328, 333, 343 leather 138, 140, 334, 336
iconography 3 n.3, 6, 9, 38, 39, 48, Leigh, Vivian 226–7, 345 n.107
109, 145 Lessing, Gotthold 36, 38
Imperial Capuchin Crypt, Leszczinska, Marie 145, 147, 148
Habsburg 109, 293 letters 98, 119, 326 n.11, 327 n.17,
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 329 n.26
144 n.32, 149 Lichtscheidl, Olivia 56, 65, 364
intertitle 317, 318, 320 Lissi und der wilde Kaiser 19, 229
Iron Curtain 92–3, 92 n.34 n.40, 251
Jacobs, Lea 303 n.11, 307 n.27 Love, Heather 220, 222, 223 n.19
388 Index
Lucheni, Luigi 49 n.52, 106, 260, memorabilia 16, 63, 82, 100, 348
268 memorials 39, 40, 68, 73, 82, 84, 86,
Luciano, Dana 220, 222 89, 110, 112, 122
Ludwig I, King of Bavaria 139 memory 1–5, 7, 8 n.23, 11–13, 17,
Ludwig II, King of Bavaria 199, 18, 21, 23, 24, 39, 54, 55, 73,
316, 316 n.45 78, 81, 86, 88, 100, 103, 106,
107 n.14, 108, 114, 116, 117,
Madame Tussaud’s 342–6 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 156,
Madeira 9, 218, 228, 229, 235, 290, 215, 249, 252, 267, 282, 293,
295, 326 n.11 316–18, 320, 321, 344 n.102,
Mademoiselle Armande 137, 143, 366
144, 148 collective (and cultural) 8 n.23,
Mahmoud 334, 335 54, 87, 100, 117, 366
Makart, Hans 151, 349 Menia, Roberto 118 n.55, 122
Man Ray 159 n.16, 166, 167 Menke, Bettine 257, 265 n.74
Mandarin Chinese 182, 190 Meridiano di Trieste 115, 116 n.45,
Manet, Óduoard 135, 143, 144, 120
148, 151, 152 Messerschmidt, Franz Xaver 35,
Maria Theresa, Holy Roman 45, 46
Empress 33, 41–6, 67, 68, 77, Métiers d’Art 157 n.10, 168, 169
96, 142 n.28, 234, 294 Middleton, Bay 16 n.54, 17
Marie Valerie, Archduchess of Miethke and Warra (Studio) 136,
Austria 97, 150 n.48, 335 141
Marischka, Ernst 18, 19, 91, 182, mimetic innervation 57, 58, 64,
183, 224, 227 66, 77
marketing 56, 75, 81, 125, 176, 356, Minneapolis 356, 365, 368 n.57,
358, 363, 367, 369, 370, 372, 372
377, 381 minorities 10, 56, 91, 109, 256, 268,
Maximilian Joseph (Max), Duke in 377
Bavaria 104, 111 Miramar/Miramare Castle 8, 107
Mayerling 91, 193, 316 n.13, 107, 108, 113–16, 118,
Mazzoli, Enrico 122, 123 123, 126, 127
McCauley, Elizabeth Anne 138 n.9, Mitscherlich, Alexander and
138 n.11, 140 n.18, 140 n.19, Margarethe 221, 222
144 Mitteleuropa 117, 121, 123
McQueen, Alison 142, 145 modernity 8 n.23, 14, 16, 82, 135,
media 54, 55 n.7, 58, 61, 71, 72, 138, 225, 243, 264, 341
75–8, 156, 157, 191, 260, 261, Moltke, Johannes von 225, 226,
266, 279, 327–9, 350 233
Mediterranean 10, 107, 118, 123, monuments 10, 11, 29, 33–5, 38
228 n.20, 39, 41, 42–4, 47, 49, 68,
Medusa 163 89 n.21, 103–28, 278, 279, 296
melancholia 220–2, 242, 350 war of 110, 118
Méliés, Georges 242 Moon, Michael 324, 325 n.6, 346
Index 389
Mulatshak 243–4 Nazis/Nazism 6, 22, 23, 119, 120,

Munich 35, 36, 109, 144 122, 217, 218, 220, 221, 233,
museums 7, 40, 41, 53–78, 81–3, 235, 236, 238, 242–4, 253, 302
88, 94, 95–8, 100, 109, 113, Nene, Duchess Helene in Bavaria
123, 132–7, 194–8, 248, 249, 231, 235, 240
275, 339, 342 344 n.104, 349, Neuschwanstein Castle 185 n.7,
355–72 199
Museumsplatz 41, 42 New York 265, 279, 294, 296, 297
music 20, 21 n.71, 63, 111, 170, 182, newspapers 42 n.32, 97, 181 n.1,
225, 285, 295, 298, 371 260, 333 n.41, 342, 345 n.104,
musical 19–20, 21 n.71, 94, 156, 346
159, 247, 251, 253, 275, 279 nobility 7, 8, 17, 24, 203
n.13, 294 nostalgia 12–20, 54, 55, 57–60,
Musikverein 47, 198 62–4, 70–7, 78, 82, 83, 88, 98,
myth 1, 3–7, 12, 13, 18, 23, 24, 34, 114, 128, 131, 188, 241, 243,
56, 63, 70, 74, 84–6, 94–5, 97, 244, 357, 358, 371, 379
100, 104, 115, 121, 127, 155,
157, 159, 162–4, 167–9, 171, Oberdan(k), Guglielmo 118, 119,
175–7, 219, 223, 247, 248, 122, 123
252, 275, 278, 283, 284, 286, objects 6, 7, 24, 54–9, 62, 65–7, 72,
294 n.72, 299, 302, 305, 363, 76–8, 96–8, 126, 135, 145,
372 164, 169 n.54, 186, 195–7,
mythemes 163, 164 220, 221, 223, 305 n.17, 312,
313, 318, 326, 341, 344, 357,
naming 38, 47, 189 n.23, 190, 201, 358, 361, 365, 366, 368, 370
221 One Belt, One Road Initiative 194,
Napoléon III, Emperor 145–7 195
narrative 3, 5, 9, 15, 19, 29, 55, Osservatore Triestino 104, 105 n.5,
56, 58, 59, 63, 67, 71, 74, 76, 106, 108 n.20, 110 n.25
78, 84, 85, 94, 137, 143, 148, Ozoray, Aladár 98, 100
162, 192, 193, 195, 215–8,
220, 222, 229, 232, 236, 237, painting 6, 7, 36, 61 n.35, 67, 97,
239, 242, 243, 249, 252–3, 131–52, 156, 159, 163 n.32,
255–7, 259, 262, 264, 266, 163, 165, 176, 195, 206, 227,
268, 276–80, 283–6, 288–91, 235, 260, 263, 275, 285, 303,
294–9, 303, 307, 308, 314, 306, 311, 312, 314, 339, 349,
317, 321, 355, 356, 358, 362, 365, 367
363, 366, 368 Paris 20, 109, 138, 141, 167 n.47,
narrative structure 252, 268 169 n.53, 198, 291, 302, 328
national identity 3, 12, 15, 23, parody 19, 169 n.54, 229 n.40, 235,
60, 225, 232, 238, 275, 277, 247–9, 251–4, 256, 257, 259,
283–5, 290 270, 296 n.86
nationalism 83, 87, 112, 218 Pataki, Allison 4 n.7, 21 n.69, 23
Hungarian 83, 87 n.79, 70 n.69, 355, 359
390 Index
performativity 220, 222, 230, 236, prostitutes 134, 140, 142, 282
252, 253 Pula/Pola 106, 110
photographs 162–7, 175–6, 267,
293, 334–6, 339 queenhood 325, 326, 343
photography 73 n.82, 75, 97, 131, queer 18, 19, 216–20, 222–4, 229,
138–9, 140 n.18, 141 n.22, 230, 236–8, 241, 243, 244,
143, 144, 158, 159, 161 n.22, 247–70, 324, 337
163 n.31, 168, 175, 176, 201, affect 220, 222
266, 327, 334, 336, 344 time (temporalities) 236, 237,
Piazza della Libertα 103, 116 243, 252
Piazza Unitá (Trieste) 115 n.40, 124 queerness 220, 223, 247, 259
Piccolo, Il 104 n.3, 105, 106 n.11,
109 n.23, 112 n.31, 116, 118, Reincarnation 5, 168, 169 n.53, 169
120, 121 n.69, 122, 123 n.75, n.55, 171–3
127 religion/religious practice 76, 88,
Pitacco, Giorgio 113 108, 113, 164, 196, 240 n.56,
Plunkett, John 327, 343 n.92 242, 255, 260, 265, 285, 309
poems 62, 64, 65, 162, 166 n.45, Riegl, Alois 1, 34
168, 169, 269 n.95, 306, 308, Ringstrasse 34, 39–42, 47, 192, 371
323, 324, 329, 331, 339 n.77, romance 1, 17, 22, 54, 126, 183, 185,
350, 368 192, 198, 201, 215, 237, 330,
Portraits of Empress Elizabeth 6–7, 332, 371
61 n.35, 131–8, 145, 147–52, Rosolen, Alessia 116 n.45, 121
156, 159, 165, 166, 170, 176, Roth, Joseph 14 n.49, 15 n.50
263, 314, 315, 317, 367 royal couple (Sissi and Franz
portraiture 6, 42 n.31, 44, 45, 61 Joseph) 20, 23, 82, 86, 97,
n.35, 97, 104, 131, 132–52, 219, 232, 233, 237, 239, 364,
156, 159, 165, 170, 172, 176, 368
192 n.28, 196, 207, 263, 292, coronation 23, 44, 82, 93, 193
314, 315, 317, 335, 339, 340, n.32, 196, 218, 233
342, 349, 367 honeymoon 217, 287, 324
Possenhofen 218, 224–6, 231, 233 marriage 3, 22, 83, 175, 176, 183,
postcolonial theory 276, 277, 283, 195, 216, 218, 235, 255, 275,
299 297, 324, 331, 332, 336, 338,
postmemory 70, 73 363, 364, 369
Pozzi, Catherine 167, 168 Rudolph, Crown Prince of Austria
pregnancy 142 n.28, 143, 149, 293, 9, 316, 332 n.39
297, 324, 328, 332 n.39
press 11, 41, 97, 114, 161 n.25, 255, Salzburg 22, 158, 168, 169, 173,
323 n.2, 329, 334, 337, 339, 205
341, 358, 359, 361 Salzkammergut 182, 208 n.70
processions 42, 43, 105, 162, San Giusto Cathedral 106, 108
218–20, 233, 237–40, 242, Schlipphacke, Heidi 13 n.42, 14
243, 324, 332, 336 n.46, 18, 54 n.2, 156 n.3, 185
Index 391
n.9, 215 n.1, 253, 254, 265 Sissi, the Young Empress 218, 225,
n.73 291
Schloss Schönbrunn Kultur-und Sissimania 2, 126
Betriebsges (museum) 23 Slovenia 103, 117, 120, 122, 126
n.79, 67, 198, 279 n.13, 356, Smith, Anthony D. 277, 283, 284,
360, 361, 363, 364, 372 289
Schneider, Magda 18, 226 Snow White 325–6, 329 n.25, 347
Schneider, Romy 1, 8 n.25, 18, 19, social media 54, 55 n.7, 58, 61, 71,
64, 91, 115, 155 n.1, 167 n.47, 72, 75–8, 266
182, 185, 189, 192, 194, 202, Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 140
203–5, 209, 215, 219, 226, n.18, 143
227, 238, 249, 250, 254, 255, Sontag, Susan 223, 243, 254
266, 270, 291, 292 Sophie, Archduchess of Austria
Schönbrunn Palace 23 n.79, 67, 131 (daughter of Empress
n.1, 198, 205, 227, 237, 255, Elizabeth) 9, 86
279 n.13, 355, 356, 360, 361, Sophie, Princess of Bavaria 131
363, 364, 372 n.1, 139–40, 186 n.11, 188,
Schorske, Carl 34, 44, 45 n.44, 47 192, 218, 240, 260
Schrotzberg, Franz 339–40, 367 The Sound of Music 22, 371
sculpture 29–50, 145, 147, 156, 165 South Tyrol 217, 218, 231
n.39, 290, 334 souvenirs 14, 58, 67, 71, 74–6, 78,
Sedgwick, Even Kosofsky 250 159, 256, 358, 370
n.14, 267–8, 325, 334 n.51, Soviet Union 91, 98, 128
346 n.109 Spanish Court 227
Sefaris, George 53, 65 n.48, 75 spectacle 37, 66, 217, 229, 238, 242,
servants 97, 161, 231, 231 n.42, 232, 266, 301 n.3, 302 n.5, 303–21,
283, 288, 316 366
Silva, Carmen 50 n.52, 260 spectators 38, 48, 66, 215–17, 224,
Sina Weibo 182, 206, 207 226, 227, 229, 231, 232, 235,
Sinclair, Andrew 329 n.24, 331 239, 242, 244, 253, 254, 266,
n.32, 334, 338 n.72, 338 n.73, 306, 317, 365
341 n.88, 349 n.117 spectatorship 37, 38, 222
Sisi. See Elisabeth Spencer, Earl 329, 330
Sisi Museum 7, 48 n.51, 49 n.52, Staatsvertrag (Austrian) 18, 217
53–78, 198, 248, 249, 358, statues 3 n.2, 5, 10, 12, 21, 41, 45,
359, 367 63, 89, 103–28, 156, 161, 162,
Sisi Straóe/Sisi Street 17, 248 165, 169, 208, 239, 275, 281,
Sissi. See Elisabeth 286, 296, 297, 311, 326, 342,
Sissi films 8 n.25, 18, 20, 63, 64, 343–5
91, 115, 156, 182–3, 188–9, Stewart, Susan 57, 58, 63–5, 67–9,
190, 192, 194, 196, 198, 70, 74 n.88, 75–8
201–3, 205, 208, 209, 215–44, Stieler, Joseph Karl 139, 144
247–70, 278–9, 291, 296, 319, Straub, Mirja 131 n.2, 149, 159
332 n.41 n.16, 176 n.66
392 Index
tableaux vivants 215, 217, 220, 228, urban populations 10, 108, 183
229 Urry, John 356, 357, 362
tabloids 93, 94
Taobao.com 199–201 Valerie. See Marie Valerie
Taylor, Diana 57 n.16, 71 n.75, 72 Venice 126, 208 n.70, 219, 233, 238,
n.77, 73, 328, 343 239, 244
tears 36, 240, 323, 331, 350 Vér, Eszter Virág 84, 86, 88
television 18, 58, 188, 216, 249, 250 Victoria, Queen of the United
temporality 216–7, 236–7, 239, 241, Kingdom 8 n.25, 17, 86, 141,
243, 252 176 n.66, 263–4, 323–38, 341
theater 62, 64, 94 n.42, 165 n.40, n.87, 343, 345, 347, 349 n.117,
227, 232, 242, 247, 301–3, 305 350
n.17, 306, 307, 309–11, 313 Vienna 2, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 19,
tourism 17, 55, 59 n.31, 68, 74, 76, 36, 40, 41, 45, 55, 60, 67, 74,
78, 88, 96, 107 n.14, 115–17, 78, 89 n.22, 94, 104, 106,
123, 160, 181 n.1, 182, 198, 110, 123, 126, 134, 141, 149,
199, 228, 248, 329, 336, 150 n.49, 166, 181, 182, 196,
355–60, 362, 372 198–9, 209–10, 218, 224, 227,
tragedy 1, 12, 91, 111, 193, 236, 302 232, 237, 247–9, 264, 269, 276,
n.9, 303, 307, 309, 310, 320, 278–87, 289, 290, 292–99,
332 324, 334, 355–65, 370, 372
transvestitism 229, 288 Vienna Tourism 355–9, 372
trash musical 247, 251 Virgin Mary 9, 306
trauma 9, 73 n.82, 91, 122, 217, 221, virginity 328, 348
260 Visconti, Luchino 19, 219
travel 17, 20, 23, 24, 38, 41, 55, 59, Vocelka, Karl 359, 362–4
65, 68, 74, 75, 78, 81, 90, 104, Vogel, Juliane 134 n.5, 165 n.42,
141, 160, 166, 193, 195, 198, 166 n.44, 166 n.46, 248 n.3,
199, 208, 209, 216–7, 219, 260 n.55, 266 n.78, 266 n.79,
220, 228, 229, 231, 233–5, 266 n.80, 267, 269 n.97, 278
237, 238, 248, 253, 260, 278, n.10, 278 n.11
283, 285, 295, 326 n.11, 332, voice 63, 64, 66, 95, 118, 124 n.81,
341, 356, 361, 362, 365, 368 189, 260, 261, 265, 276 n.3,
Trieste 5, 8, 12, 17, 103–28 279, 294–6
Triester Zeitung 105, 107 n.16 Volksgarten 45, 68, 278, 296
TripAdvisor 55, 62, 64, 67, 75, 76,
360 Walburga Hapsburg Douglas,
Truger, Ulrike 2, 29–50 Countess 92, 93
Twain, Mark 329, 347 Wanderlust 177, 233, 234
Wauchope, Mary 227, 236 n.47,
uncanny 66, 73, 74, 77, 259, 329 279 n.12
n.25, 347 wax figures 10, 24, 342–7, 349, 350
United States 2, 15, 22, 55 n.7, 184, wax queen 343, 347
356, 365–72 waxworks 342, 343, 345
Index 393
weddings 72, 93, 192, 201, 218, Worth, Charles Frederick 147, 166,
223, 227–8, 239, 240, 262, 172, 203, 367
287, 324, 325, 331, 333, 343 Wunderblock 249, 344 n.102
n.93, 348, 359, 364
Wien Museum 40 Xixi (Sisi) 2, 18, 181–210
Wiener Passion 16, 275–99 Xixi Gongzhu 200, 202–4
Williams, Pharrell 5 n.13, 169 n.53,
169 n.55, 170, 174, 175 Yonan, Michael 44 n.41, 67, 143
Winckelmann, Johann 9, 36, 37 n.28
Winterhalter, Franz Xaver 6–7, 61 Young Empress 18, 185, 186, 215,
n.35, 131–52, 156, 159, 165, 217, 218, 225, 231, 233, 235,
166, 170, 176, 263, 314, 315, 238, 241, 291
317, 367 Young, James 34–5
Wohlfahrt, Michael 56, 65, 364 n.37
World War I 12, 13, 112, 114, Zala, György 44 n.42, 89
119–22, 125 Zou Zou 137, 144, 148
World War II 18, 22, 23, 114, 119, Zumbusch, Caspar von 41, 42, 45
218, 291 n.57, 302

(New Directions in German Studies, 22) Maura E. Hametz (Editor), Heidi Schlipphacke (Editor) - Sissi's World - The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth-Bloomsbury Academic (2018)

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN GERMAN STUDIES

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are

First published in the United States of America 2018

Copyright © Maura E. Hametz, Heidi Schlipphacke, and Contributors, 2018

Cover design: Andrea Federle-Bucsi

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1344-8

Series: New Directions in German Studies

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

1 Introduction: “Sissi”: The Convergence of Memory and Myth

2 Encounters: Ulrike Truger, Elisabeth—Zwang—

3 The Remains of the Stay: The Corporeal Archive of Empress

4 Sisi Redux: The Empress Elisabeth and Her Cult in Post-

How the Habsburgs Demolished the Iron Curtain 92

5 A Place for Sissi in Trieste

6 Empress Elisabeth and the Painting of Modern Life

7 Karl Lagerfeld and the Elisabeth Myth

8 Sissi, the Chinese Princess: A Timely and Versatile Post-Mao

9 Melancholy Empress: Queering Empire in Ernst

10 Sisi: A Double Reflection on a “Queer Icon”

11 Imagining Austria: Myths of “Sisi” and National Identity in

12 Cocteau’s Queen: Sissi Between Legend, Spectacle, and

13 Fat, Thin, Sad: Victoria, Sissi, Diana and the

14 Sisi in the Museum: Exhibits in Vienna and the US

Notes on Contributors 375

Figure 2.1: Ulrike Truger, Elisabeth—Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit,

Photographische-Artistische Anstalt, Wien, ca. 1856–64,

Figure 8.6: Dingxiu Meiquan Hotel’s official Weibo account:

Our debts are many and cannot possibly be sufficiently acknowledged,

contemporary artist Ulrike Truger,2 the image of the Empress Elisabeth

Memory and Myth

3 On associations of the Habsburg emperors with ancient Roman, Hebraic,

really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up

signification, a form” that is “not defined by the object of its message,

17 Barthes, Mythologies, 109.

this volume, Florek shows how Winterhalter’s paintings of Elisabeth

tradition.”23 This conception of nobility continues to be associated with

23 Halbwachs, Collective Memory, 128–9. The premodern period assigned “a sin-

26 For a description of the Mater Dolorosa exhibition, see “‘Mater dolorosa’:

29 Adam Kożuchowski, The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary: The Image of the Habsburg

33 Alice Freifeld, “Empress Elisabeth as Hungarian Queen: The Uses of Celebrity

Elisabeth/Sissi and Nostalgia

symbolic power of the Habsburgs in Vienna and “introducing” them to

40 Kożuchowski, Afterlife of Austria-Hungary, 162.

Nostalgia, as defined by Svetlana Boym, is an “historical emotion” and

associate Heimat, love of home, with national identity, but what do we

example Elizabeth Sprigge’s The Raven’s Wing, published in 1940 and

53 Elizabeth Sprigge, Raven’s Wing (New York: Macmillan, 1940).

55 See Welcome, The Sporting Empress.

who represses her sexual desires. In a book purporting to get behind

Of course, other films and theatrical productions about the Empress

scheduled throughout Germany in 2018.64 While the success of the

Sissi in North America?

For American audiences, Austrian identity, if it is acknowledged,

of court life, her horsemanship, and reputation as a friend of the

figures de l’histoire written by Patricia Crété and published by Quelle Histoire.

in the former empire.82 The Empress’s role as consort in upholding the

82 On “Pietas Austriaca” and “Pietas Habsburgica” in the geographic context, see

“I want to be effective in these times.”

Ulrike Truger’s sculpture Elisabeth offers three concepts or experiences,

Figure 2.1 Ulrike Truger, Elisabeth—Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit, 1998–1999,

Figure 2.2 Ulrike Truger, Elisabeth—Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit, 1998–1999,

Figure 2.3 Ulrike Truger, Elisabeth—Zwang—Flucht—Freiheit, 1998–1999,

1 Introduction: “Sissi”: The Convergence of Memory and Myth

How the Habsburgs Demolished the Iron Curtain 92

5 A Place for Sissi in Trieste

6 Empress Elisabeth and the Painting of Modern Life

7 Karl Lagerfeld and the Elisabeth Myth

10 Sisi: A Double Reflection on a “Queer Icon”

14 Sisi in the Museum: Exhibits in Vienna and the US

Notes on Contributors 375