B008AITH44 EBOK (66 page)

 

F
or all practical purposes, Gisela and Rudolf grew up without a mother. Elisabeth was so preoccupied with her own worries and cares that she devoted little time to the children and offered them neither warmth nor security. She considered them the foster children of Archduchess Sophie, and that was enough to permanently impair the relationship.

Nevertheless, whenever Elisabeth turned up at the Viennese court for one of her sudden, short stays, she showed herself to be a strong (though extremely self-willed) personality, with such a power of attraction that even the little Crown Prince idolized her—not like a mother, but rather like a beautiful apparition out of a fairy tale, bringing life into his gray, duty-bound days.

More than either of his sisters, Rudolf was his mother’s child.
Temperament
and talents, imagination, liveliness, sensibility, wit, a quick
understanding
—all these he shared with Elisabeth. Marie Festetics on the fifteen-year-old boy: “The Crown Prince’s eyes glowed. He was thrilled to be with his mother, whom he worships … he is very like his
mother
, in particular, he has her charm as well as her brown eyes.”
¹

All his life, Rudolf gratefully remembered that in 1865, when he had been tested so severely mentally and physically, it was his mother who had taken his part with such fervor (
see here
). Even the little Crown Prince was fully aware that she had been able to bring about the change only at the cost of real family rifts and only against strong court opposition. Latour, the tutor Elisabeth selected, became a deeply beloved father
substitute
to the little boy. And Latour taught the boy the same liberal views Elisabeth herself developed. Latour brought mother and son very close, even if they had little direct contact with each other.

His markedly bourgeois—even anticourt—education distanced the Crown Prince from his aristocratic surroundings. It erected barriers that subsequently proved insurmountable. From childhood on, Rudolf had to live with the heavy burden of being Elisabeth’s son—and of being so very like her. All the Empress’s antagonists saw Rudolf as a potential danger—specifically, they scented the danger that eventually they would be living under a “revolutionary,” “bourgeois,” “anticlerical,” “
antiaristocratic
” emperor, someone rather like Elisabeth. And this danger (seen, conversely, as a hope by large groups of the population) did indeed exist.

During Elisabeth’s most politically active period, after the defeat of Königgrätz and during the negotiations in Budapest, Rudolf, aged eight, was with his mother in Hungary. Here, the Crown Prince met Gyula Andrássy, whom he revered all his life and who was as influential to the boy’s political world view as he was to Elisabeth’s. Those few weeks in Budapest with his mother and Andrássy—Franz Joseph was in Vienna—were, for Rudolf, the best time he ever spent with his mother (
see here
).

But Elisabeth’s support of her son in 1865 and the time in Budapest remained isolated episodes. In 1868, Marie Valerie was born—Elisabeth’s “coronation gift” to Hungary. The Crown Prince, who was nine years old, was shunted aside.

Gisela married at sixteen and moved to Bavaria. Her relations with her mother were chilly. Though the Crown Prince remained in Vienna, he was practically abandoned to his teachers and tutors. The beautiful mother he worshiped paid no attention to him. Her thoughts were concentrated on
Valerie, and Rudolf grew extremely jealous. He treated the little girl roughly and unkindly. Valerie, for her part, was afraid of her big brother. In this situation, Elisabeth, like a brood hen, went over entirely to her youngest child and rejected her son even more.

It rarely happened that all the members of the imperial family were in one place at the same time. Each member of the imperial family had his own household; petty jealousies and dissensions raged between the various staffs. Given the circumstances, it was almost never possible to create a feeling of family intimacy. They were strangers to each other, and as Archduchess Valerie noted, their meetings were marked by awkwardness and embarrassment. Elisabeth would have had to take the initiative even to begin approaching her son. But she did not take the first step, nor did Emperor Franz Joseph.

Thus, Rudolf remained isolated not only at court, but also within the immediate family. No one was aware that he had problems. The successor to the throne was regarded with respectful timidity and with distrust. Valerie once confessed to one of her Bavarian relatives that, though she lived under the same roof with Rudolf, she might not see him for months on end.
²
Gisela, who was closest to her brother, noted with surprise during a visit to Vienna, “actually the whole family regards him as a person to be treated with caution.” To which Valerie replied, “The poor man! Unfortunately, it’s only too true.”
³
The kind of trusting and confidential relationship that existed between Elisabeth and Valerie was out of the question for Rudolf and his mother.

Rudolf’s marriage to Stephanie, daughter of the King of the Belgians, placed an additional strain on family relations. Elisabeth in particular stubbornly maintained her dislike of her daughter-in-law. But when young Stephanie showed an interest in making obligatory public appearances—since she felt at ease in public and enjoyed attracting attention—Elisabeth saw her chance simply to pass on to her daughter-in-law (who was only seventeen) the major part of these tasks. In her memoirs, Stephanie recalled Elisabeth’s words. “This drudgery, this torture, as she called the duties of her position, were hateful to her…. She espoused the view that freedom was everyone’s right. Her picture of life resembled a beautiful fairy-tale dream of a world without sorrow or constraint.”
⁴

Elisabeth’s poems expressed great dislike of Stephanie, who valued outward appearances and social forms above all (which was not good for her marriage to the unconventional Crown Prince). Elisabeth felt great scorn for the “mighty bumpkin” with her “long, fake tresses” and her “cunningly watchful” eyes.
⁵

Young Stephanie’s frequent public appearances several times put the Empress in the shade, just as had happened many years before in connection with Stephanie’s aunt Carlotta of Mexico (now dreaming the rest of her poor, disturbed life away in a castle in Belgium). Whenever Elisabeth wanted to hurt Stephanie’s feelings, she alluded to this sister-in-law, whom at one time she had so cordially abhorred. The fact that Stephanie proved herself a committed friend to the high aristocracy and for her part criticized Elisabeth’s lack of a sense of duty was enough to cool the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law forever.

Nor did the Crown Prince and his wife receive support from the Emperor. The generations were alienated from each other, and there was no familiarity. Valerie, in 1884: “How different, how courteous but
self-conscious
Papa is with them [Rudolf and Stephanie] as compared with [his behavior to] me! Surely that is the reason for Rudolf’s jealousy.”
⁶

Rudolf all but courted his mother’s favor, imitating her preferences and dislikes down to the last detail. Elisabeth, for example, was fond of large dogs, who followed her into the most precious salons—to the Emperor’s perpetual consternation. The Crown Prince, too, surrounded himself with dogs; around 1880, in Prague, he even opened a dog-breeding
establishment,
where he specialized in wolfhounds. In the Crown Prince,
Elisabeth’s
love of animals grew into a thorough and serious preoccupation with zoology—more particularly, with ornithology. Rudolf made long sea voyages for research, traveling most particularly with his older friend, Alfred Brehm (on whose
Tierleben
he collaborated). He honored the scholar to such an extent that the ship’s officers made fun of his attitude
⁷
—not unlike the ridicule the crew of the
Greif
heaped on the Empress because she overwhelmed Alexander von Warsberg, her archeological guide through Greece, with gratitude and favor.

The Emperor very generously allowed his wife to pursue her interests. But he refused to grant the Crown Prince’s dearest wish—to attend the university and study the natural sciences. At that time, university study was out of the question for a Habsburg, considered out of keeping with the standing of the dynasty. This stance was in contrast to that of the House of Hohenzollern. Prince Wilhelm (later Wilhelm II), who was Rudolf’s coeval, was practically forced by his liberal parents to study at the
University
of Bonn. The young man complied with their wishes with less than moderate enthusiasm and without taking a degree. The Wittelsbach family also did not consider an involvement in the sciences out of place.
Elisabeth’s
brother, Karl Theodor, the head of the ducal branch, was an ophthalmologist, recognized even in professional circles. But Emperor
Franz Joseph insisted that his son become a soldier. As for Rudolf’s propensity for science and literature—the Emperor regarded these interests as mere “notions”—very like his comments on Elisabeth’s predilections.

Rudolf had to content himself with remaining a self-taught
ornithologist;
and yet he managed to complete an amazing body of work, respected by professionals to this day.
⁸
His parents took no cognizance of it. His career as a soldier was less distinguished, to his father’s great
disappointment.
The Crown Prince also worked on political memoranda and wrote clandestine political editorials for the “democratic organ,”
Neues
Wiener
Tagblatt
, under his friend Moritz Szeps. The common interests of Rudolf and Elisabeth went so far that both Empress and Crown Prince had their writings printed at about the same time by the state printing office, both in very small editions. And yet neither knew of the other’s work. Rudolf composed “Reisebilder” (Travel Images); unfinished, preserved only in manuscript, while Elisabeth wrote her two volumes of poetry. All three works were indebted to Heine.

As a nineteen-year-old, Rudolf wrote his first anonymous pamphlet,
Der
Österreichische
Adel
und
sein
constitutioneller
Beruf
(The Austrian
Nobility
and Its Constitutional Calling), in which he lashed out at the privileges of the nobility, which were not earned by work and achievements—his principal accusations differing little from his mother’s.
⁹
Elisabeth was not familiar with her son’s forty-eight-page pamphlet any more than was the Emperor. Rudolf was so shy of his parents—even afraid of them—that he did not dare to show them his writings.

Elisabeth’s anticlericalism, her very independent position on the dogmas of the Catholic church, are also found in Rudolf. Even her enthusiasm for republicanism was passed on—without her knowledge—to the Crown Prince. Prince Karl Khevenhüller on the twenty-year-old Rudolf: “He talked a lot of incongruous nonsense about freedom and equality, railed at the nobility as an outmoded idea, and said that the best position he could wish for himself was to be the president of a republic.”
¹⁰

And if Elisabeth took seriously the possibility of exile in Switzerland (even considering such “retirement” desirable), Rudolf, too, toyed with the thought of a potential bourgeois life. “If I am chased away from here, I will enter the service of a republic, probably the service of France,” he confessed to his confidant, the journalist Berthold Frischauer.
¹¹

Elisabeth’s political views were also passed on to her son in their entirety. Elisabeth and Rudolf both saw in Andrássy the great man who could lead Austria-Hungary out of the calamities of the old times into a new, modern, liberal world. At the age of nineteen, for example, Rudolf
told Marie Festetics that “every day he thanked God for Andrássy’s being in the world. For only as long as he was there would everything go well.”
¹²
The first political memorandum the twenty-two-year-old Crown Prince wrote was an unmitigated paean of praise to Andrássy.
¹³

With the same unanimity with which they defended the person and policies of Andrássy, Elisabeth and Rudolf condemned Count Eduard Taaffe, the prime minister. A childhood friend of the Emperor, Taaffe took office after the fiasco of the Liberals in 1879. There was no possible area of agreement between Taaffe and Andrássy. Shortly after Taaffe joined the government, Andrássy tendered his resignation on grounds of poor health. It was granted at once—which he had not expected. He had wanted to be asked to stay on as foreign minister. In that way, he would have
strengthened
his position vis-à-vis Taaffe, his archenemy, and would have had a chance to win the power struggle.