Abstract
Long before her assassination in 1898, Empress Elisabeth of Austria was a figure of mystery and tragedy. Married to Franz Joseph I at 16, she found court life uncongenial from the start and deeply resented her mother-in-law’s domineering attitude. Periods of ill-health led her to seek refuge and recovery in Hungary and the Mediterranean. Even when she was in Vienna she refused to appear in family photographs, so that Franz Joseph had to resort to having her ‘photoshopped’ into the carte de visite photographs he became so fond of distributing in the 1850s. Always of fragile health and given to an obsession with her figure that may have been a form of anorexia, she never recovered from the shock of the murder/suicide of her son and his mistress at Mayerling in 1889. In her last years she spent a fortune on good works throughout the Habsburg lands and lived by preference at the palace she had constructed on Corfu.
Beauty, ill-health, melancholia, loneliness and tragedy were the perfect ingredients for a mythology that developed even during her own lifetime. Since her death she has become a kind of historical superstar appropriated in diverse ways. It is therefore most welcome that Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke have undertaken the task of mapping out the contours of ‘Sissi’ memory and myth. Their introduction gives a concise overview of their field and points to the curious fact that while the ‘Sissi’ myth has travelled widely in Europe and even to Asia, North America has largely remained untouched by it.
The 13 contributions are organized in two sections. The first is devoted to ‘memory’. This begins with essays on Ulrike Truger’s 1998–9 sculpture ‘Elisabeth – Zwang – Flucht – Freiheit’ in Vienna (Christiane Hetel) and on the Sisi Museum in the Hofburg (Beth Ann Mueller). We continue with an overview of the Sisi cult in post-communist Hungary (Judith Szapor and András Lénárt) and memories of Sissi in Trieste (Maura E. Hametz and Borut Klabjan). The focus then changes to visual images of Sissi: the paintings executed during her life and after her death (Olivia Gruber-Klorek) and the images compiled by Karl Lagerfeld in his 1996 book of photographs Achelleio/L’Achilleion and in his 2014 film Reincarnation (Carolin Maikler). Finally, Fei-Hsien Wang and Ke-chin Hsia introduce us to the Chinese Sissi or Xixi, a model for new Chinese womanhood in the age of Xi Jinping.
In the second section, devoted to ‘myth’, we meet the queered empress in Ernst Mrischka’s films (Heidi Schlipphacke) and Sissi as a queer icon (Susanne Hochreiter). Elizabeth Black discusses Cocteau’s depiction of Sissi in his 1946 play and 1948 film L’Aigle à deux têtes and in Kate Thomas’s contribution Sissi is placed alongside the widowed Queen Victoria and the tragic Princess Diana, all three of them immortalized as ‘wax queens’ in Madame Tussaud’s as well as in literature low (Barbara Cartland) and high (Thomas Hardy). The final piece by Susanne Keeley examines the museum exhibits relating to Sissi in Vienna and her ‘presence’ in images shown at the US ‘Habsburg Splendor’ show at Minneapolis, Houston and Atlanta in 2015. Keeley confirms but cannot explain the stark contrast between the enduring Austrian and European fascination with Sissi and the North American relative indifference to her.
Historians of Austria, culture, art, film, fashion and kitsch will find much of interest in this diverse volume. It certainly succeeds in its aim of establishing an outline of ‘Sissi studies’. The book is edited by two US scholars and 12 out of 16 contributors are from the US and Canada. Their next task should surely be to figure out just why the countries in which Sissi is so intensively studied have apparently been so indifferent to her allure.