B008AITH44 EBOK (58 page)

Elisabeth had given up all hope of finding understanding among her contemporaries. More than ever, she frequented the company of spirits and placed all her hopes in the “souls of the future,” for whom she wrote her
poems. She decided that, unlike the poems she had written when she was young, her verses from the 1880s should see publication. She chose 1950 as the date of printing—a time, that is, when none of her contemporaries, any more than herself, would still be alive. Elisabeth wanted, at least posthumously, to gain what her contemporaries denied her: justification, understanding, lasting fame. The often confused hymns to liberty in many of these poems were modeled on Heine’s. They were also intended as comfort for the oppressed in future times.

Elisabeth gave extraordinary care to safeguarding her poetry for
posterity.
During the winter of 1886 and 1887, she had copies made under the seal of the strictest secrecy and with the help of two family members who came from Bavaria for the purpose: Marie Larisch and Marie’s (
nonaristocratic
) cousin Henny Pecz. Countess Larisch’s claim that these copies were intended to serve as manuscripts for a secret printing of the poems
⁵
at first sounded fantastic; but by now her statements can no longer be so easily dismissed. The Empress’s literary estate in the Swiss Federal Archives actually includes, along with the manuscript originals, anonymous
printings,
until now unknown, of two volumes of poems(
Winterlieder
[Winter Songs] and
Nordseelieder
[Songs of the North Sea]), which are identical with the manuscripts.

In 1890, Elisabeth deposited a sealed casket containing both the
originals
and the printed versions in the Hofburg, with instructions that after her death, it be given to her brother Duke Karl Theodor. She requested that he, in turn, keep the box and, after a period of sixty years, pass it on to the Swiss federal president. This request was honored in 1951. The same instructions also provided that some of her closest friends—such as “beautiful prince” Rudolf Liechtenstein—be given printed copies of the poems. Prince Liechtenstein’s estate in Brno and the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna made available an additional copy of each volume to Switzerland.

(How many copies were in other hands and have been lost we cannot know. Elisabeth did not herself deal with the printer—as her son Rudolf did in similar situations—but remained entirely anonymous.)

To the casket meant for her brother, the Empress added a letter in her own hand, addressed to the recipient she had destined to sort and publish the poems in the future.

These complicated provisions indicate how deeply persecuted she felt, how suspicious she was of the Austrian authorities and of the Habsburg family, whom she did not trust to have sufficient loyalty to safeguard her poems. Even Emperor Franz Joseph, we must conclude from all these secret actions, knew nothing of the arcane dispositions his wife made for the “future souls.”

Nor did Elisabeth show faith in the stability of the monarchy. Just as she transferred a large part of her wealth (without the Emperor’s
knowledge)
to the banking House of Rothschild in Switzerland, so as to be secure in case of forced emigration, she also assigned the most valuable asset she had to leave to posterity—her writings—to Switzerland. She praised that nation in several poems as the “bulwark of liberty,” and she considered its republican form of government safer for the future than a monarchy.

In a short covering letter to the president of Switzerland, the Empress repeated the intended purpose of the money to be brought in by
publication.
“After sixty years, the profits are to be used exclusively for helpless children of political prisoners of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.”
⁷

To this day, the “future souls” cannot easily fulfill the Empress’s explicit request. For though it is fairly plain that she wanted to express criticism of the political conditions in the Danube monarchy, it is still completely uncertain what sort of political prisoners she had in mind. Who were the political prisoners of 1890? Socialists, anarchists, German nationalists; but Elisabeth cannot have meant these. Might she, as so often, have been thinking of the families of the Hungarian revolutionaries who rose against the Austrian central government of 1848–1849? And how can their
descendants
be found today?

Elisabeth’s arrangements, however, show that she was convinced of the quality of her poems. She was totally unaware that her writing was little more than dilettante rhyming.

For almost ten years, Elisabeth concentrated on her poetry. During this
time, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, turned into the self-styled Titania, Queen of the Fairies. Her husband the Emperor, unsuitable as it might have been to his personality, became Oberon, King of the Fairies. Fairies and sprites, but especially the figure of the “Master,” Heinrich Heine, began to fill Elisabeth’s life. The real people of her empire were as foreign to her as the problems of her family, including those of her son, whose sad fate fulfilled itself during this same decade—without his mother’s acknowledging or even having an inkling of his difficulties.

Only a very few intimates knew about the Empress’s versifying.
Archduchess
Marie Valerie, who probably was the most involved in listening to and reciting her mother’s poems, considered Elisabeth a major poet. Nevertheless, occasionally she made fun of Sisi’s urgent need to
communicate
at once to the “future souls” every little disagreement, every
annoyance,
couching it in poetic form. It was, she noted, a “shared family trait to leave everything to posterity. Surely one day posterity will call us a funny family.”
⁸
Valerie complained: “strange life, my mother’s—her thoughts are occupied by the past, her activities deal with the distant future. The present is, to her, an insubstantial shadow, her greatest pride that no one suspects she is a poet.”
⁹

For at first, Elisabeth did not tell the Emperor about her writing. She showed him only the childish rhymes of Archduchess Valerie, whom she talked into believing herself to be an equally gifted poet. The young girl, who is more likely to have inherited her father’s practical cast of mind than her mother’s dreamy temperament, was reluctant. Somewhat at a loss, she wrote in her diary, “Mama wants me to give my poems to Papa tomorrow, which makes me unhappy, for I am convinced that Papa thinks it affected to write poetry.”
¹⁰
Countess Festetics also cautiously noted, concerning the Emperor, “The poetic vein is not very strongly developed in him.”
¹¹

Gyula Andrássy was another of the few who were initiated into the secret. He took the Empress’s poems as the welcome occasion for
compliments,
in 1889 writing to Sisi’s chamberlain, Baron Nopcsa, “You know what a high opinion I have always had of her mind and her heart, but since reading a few of her poems, this opinion has grown into the highest admiration, and the fact that in her being, so much feeling is united with so much intellect, which would do honor even to the greatest man, I can only say briefly that no other such woman exists on earth. One thing saddens me, however, and that is that so few people know what she is. I would wish that the whole world were informed about it and admired her as such a rare personality deserves.”
¹²

Elisabeth’s brother, the ophthalmologist Karl Theodor, saw this new preoccupation with a far more sober and worried eye. He found the poems that were shown him very beautiful but warned Elisabeth against “
burrowing
so deeply into the extravagant ideas in which she lives, for he thinks that this imaginary spiritual intercourse with Heine might so overly strain her nerves that in the end, she might ‘crack up.’”
¹³
Within the family, Karl Theodor spoke bluntly about Sisi, “who is intelligent but has a ‘definite kink.’”
¹⁴

Elisabeth’s father, Duke Max, had always taken a highly critical view of his daughters, including Elisabeth. On the occasion of his diamond wedding anniversary in September 1888, he read to the assembled family his favorite passage from a newly published book,
Das
Nervöse
Jahrhundert
(The Nervous Century) by Paolo Mantegazza: “The nervousness of those who do no work can be cured only gradually—not until, that is, the dukes, counts, and barons teach their children that work is the best occupation for the nobility and at the same time the surest road to a long and happy life.”
¹⁵
This quotation was soon afterward reprinted in a celebratory article on the anniversary in the Vienna
Fremdenblatt
—coming close to public criticism of the Empress. The relationship between Elisabeth and her father, who was quite ill by this time, was so bad that she did not even attend his funeral in Munich in November 1888—officially because of her own precarious health.

*

Elisabeth’s poems from the 1880s (after Rudolf’s death in 1889, she abruptly stopped writing poetry) cover about six hundred printed pages. They constitute one long hymn to the extravagantly idolized Heine. Her adoration went far beyond the usual appreciation of a literary being, the Empress knew long passages by heart and intensively studied the poet’s life. She believed herself closely linked to Heine, who had died in Paris in 1856, considered herself his disciple, was even convinced that he was dictating the verses for her pen to record. “Every word, every letter, anything by Heine is a jewel,” Elisabeth wrote to Valerie, confessing that the poet “is with me always and everywhere.”
¹⁶

This close link with her beloved dead Master was another form of flight, no different from riding or traveling.

Elisabeth was firmly convinced of her spiritual dealings with Heine. For example, she described to Valerie one such apparition in all its details. One evening in bed, she related, she had suddenly seen before her Heine’s profile, as it was known to her from one of his portraits. She had

The Empress collected editions of Heine’s works and portraits of the poet. She surrounded herself with busts of Heine. She called on Heine’s aged
sister,
Charlotte von Embden, in Hamburg and visited Heine’s grave in Paris.