B008AITH44 EBOK (60 page)

The two friends had much in common: spiritualism, a love for the Greek poet Sappho (about whom Carmen Sylva wrote a poetic tale), and finally, their distance from worldly honors and monarchic governments. Carmen Sylva in her diary: “I must sympathize with the Social Democrats,
especially
in view of the inaction and corruption of the nobles; these ‘little people,’ after all, want only what nature confers: equality. The republican form of government is the only rational one; I can never understand the foolish people, the fact that they continue to tolerate us.”
³⁴

Carmen Sylva was also one of the few who not only accepted but also understood Elisabeth’s love for Heine. After Elisabeth’s death, she wrote:

As sovereigns, the two women had little in common. Elisabeth of Romania fully realized the responsibilities that went with her position. She was energetic and eager—though she, too, had some traits that were not entirely realistic, and she, too, was criticized for them. In Romania, she gained status through her collection of folk songs and legends and her encouragement of Romanian folklore—though she continued to write principally in German.

Carmen Sylva did not, however, encourage Elisabeth’s strivings to dedicate herself entirely to fantasy and to writing poetry in solitude. Sylva very practically expected that the obligations of a queen be met. But in this regard, Elisabeth would not be influenced even by her “poet friend.” Bluntly she wrote her daughter Valerie, “Carmen Sylva is very dear, entertaining, interesting, but her feet are firmly planted in this world; she can never understand me, though I her, I love her. She enjoys spinning tales, it gives her pleasure, and the King [Carol] is so prosaic that an emotional abyss yawns between them. Of course, she never says so openly, but I got it out of her.”
³⁶

Both “poet queens” were unfulfilled and unhappy in their marriages—sufficient reason for Carmen Sylva to decide, after a long conversation with her friend, to write “about the absurdity of marriage.”
³⁷

Whenever the opportunity presented itself, Elisabeth showed her
sympathies
for self-confident, cultured women who did not feel that their life was complete within the family, contrary to the view of the
nineteenth-century
middle class. The Emperor, on the other hand, was utterly
disconcerted
by this preference on the part of his wife. Once he openly admitted to Frau Katharina Schratt that Carmen Sylva “got on my nerves…. Of course, I kept growing colder, almost discourteous.”
³⁸

Elisabeth’s thirst for culture, her interest in philosophy, literature, and history put her at an even greater distance from her husband and the court in Vienna—a situation very similar to the one the Crown Prince had to face. At this time, Viennese society was not only uneducated, but openly
hostile to education. Foreign observers all had their little anecdotes. One such was Hugo, Count Lerchenfeld. “More than once I was transfixed in Vienna, when I heard adult, perfectly intelligent people spend hours
talking
with the deepest seriousness about absolutely childish matters. To a certain degree, I explained this lack of earnestness in their view of life by their alienation from public life, which the government forces on the nobility.”
³⁹
In this atmosphere, a well-educated and cultivated woman such as Elisabeth was more than a curiosity. She was an irritant.

In 1893, Elisabeth embellished her New Year’s wishes to the Emperor with a quotation from Schopenhauer. In response, the Emperor, though granting that the philosopher “was correct in this case,” reasserted his earlier opinion. “Otherwise, as you have correctly noted, I do not think much of such philosophical works that only serve to confuse us.”
⁴⁰
Franz Joseph continued his long letter with his usual inquiries about the weather.

There were fewer and fewer common topics of conversation. Even the few days and weeks of the year the Emperor and Empress spent under the same roof—in separate suites, located far from each other—brought no closeness; instead, the time together demonstrated their differences.

In many of her poems, Elisabeth tried to revenge herself on those around her. She caricatured the failings of all those who were her enemies—real or imagined—especially the Viennese aristocracy and all the Habsburgs. Posterity was to come to know the Habsburgs not only through the official histories written by courtiers but also with the eyes of a critic from deep inside. Elisabeth gives no evidence that she had any sense of belonging to aristocratic and court society. She proves herself an opponent of her own class, always passing the judgments of an outsider—somewhat like
judgments
Heine might have written if he had been observing these particular people.

Thus, the Empress of Austria herself presents us with the most unsparing descriptions of the Habsburg family at the end of the nineteenth century, the
fin de siècle
(the period in Austria that Hermann Broch called the “cheerful apocalypse”). She placed “fools’ caps” with bells on the heads of those by whom she felt persecuted (and that, in fact, included everyone around her in Vienna); the poems were intended to make these people ridiculous, long after her death.

Modeling herself on Heine, Elisabeth criticized the human follies of hypocrisy, artificiality, pretentiousness, addiction to medals and
distinctions,
and arrogance. Like Heine—and like her father and her son—she looked for and found these despised traits particularly in evidence among the aristocracy. She contrasted the life of these idle pleasure-seekers, as
she characterized them, with the harsh lives of the workers and the poor.

In a long poem, “Was mir der Tegernsee erzählt” (What the Tegernsee Tells Me), for example, Elisabeth lamented the despoiling of the natural landscape by new mansions along the lakeshore. This, too, became an occasion for praising workers and scorning the aristocrats.

What troubled Elisabeth most were the scandals within the Habsburg family. During the 1880s, Archduke Karl Ludwig’s two oldest sons, Franz Ferdinand and Otto, supplied her with ample material by engaging in tasteless pranks, which did irreparable harm to the reputation of the dynasty. Archduke Otto (father of the future King Karl), for example, during one drinking spree threw the pictures of the Emperor and
Empress
out of the window. Another time, in an equally drunken state, he tried to lead his cronies into his very pious wife’s bedroom (in order, he said, to show them a “nun”), but was prevented from carrying out his intention by his adjutant. Elisabeth combined these two scandals into one poem, “Eine wahre Geschichte: Geschehen zu Klagenfurt im Jahre 1886” (A True History Which Occurred in Klagenfurt in the Year 1886), with the moral:

In 1886, one of the two archdukes (according to some witnesses, it was Franz Ferdinand; according to others, his younger brother Otto) caused a scandal that quickly became public knowledge when he jumped his horse over a coffin being carried to the cemetery. This, too, served Elisabeth as the occasion for a long poem, “Eine wahre Begebenheit, geschehen zu Enns” (A True Occurrence, Which Happened at Enns).

Time and again the Empress contrasted the Habsburgs’ sense of being among the elect with the middle-class virtues of the age of liberalism.

Also like Heinrich Heine, Elisabeth questioned monarchy as a form of government, proving herself a committed republican. The entries from Elisabeth’s diary quoted by Marie Larisch are totally in accord with the testimony of the poems and are convincing.

(These lines are taken from Heine’s well-known satire on royalty, “Kobes I.”)

Elisabeth’s views made a lasting impression on her children. Not only Crown Prince Rudolf, but also the “only child,” Archduchess Valerie, believed that the “republic is the best form of government”—and ascribed their statements to their mother.
⁴³

Even the first poem in
Winterlieder
utterly destroys the legend of the nonpolitical Empress. Elisabeth unmistakably allows her imperial consort to speak—though in a dream—and characterizes him and his policies mercilessly. It is improbable that Franz Joseph ever saw these lines.
Elisabeth’s
closing couplet—to the effect that she would be incarcerated in Bründlfeld (Vienna’s renowned insane asylum) should her poem become common knowledge—clearly shows that she had no illusions about the discrepancy offered by an empress and queen’s admitting to being a republican.

Another long poem, equally political and relating to the Emperor, “Neujahrsnacht 1887” (New Year’s Night 1887), found at the end of the second volume,
Nordseelieder
, is placed in a similarly prominent
position.
This poem, too, was conceived at the time of the Bulgarian crisis, when the Danube monarchy—that venerable old oak—once again saw its survival threatened. To the west, a new German-French war loomed; it could not leave Austria-Hungary, the ally of the German Reich,
untouched.
The Judgment Day mood of the poem has clear parallels in Crown Prince Rudolf’s political pamphlets written at the same time. What is remarkable is that even in this context, Elisabeth presents her husband as “unlucky” (
Pechvogel
), a word he sometimes applied to himself.