Mary Vetsera, the doomed lover of Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, who in 1889 shot her and then himself at his hunting lodge in Mayerling, in the woods outside Vienna. Photo of a museum photo by Matthew Stevenson.
My plan for Monday was to read newspapers in the Cafe Bräunerhof and bike to the royal hunting lodge in Mayerling. There in January 1889, the Habsburg crown prince Rudolph killed his lover, Mary Vetsera, and then himself in a murder-suicide that might well have brought down the house of the Habsburgs—if not imperial Europe.
In many ways, neither his parents, Emperor Franz-Josef and Empress Elisabeth, nor Austria-Hungary ever recovered from the tragedy, and at the end of World War I the empire was no more. But in all my time in Vienna, I had never visited the scene of the crime, which is about thirty miles from the Ringstrasse.
The emotionally erratic Rudolph had used the lodge to hunt in the surrounding Vienna Woods, and it was there that he decided to shock his imperial world. In many ways Rudolph’s life was one long suicide note, but in his last he wrote, “I do not die willingly, but I must do so to save my honor.”
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As I had the full day, I thought that I might ride the thirty miles from Vienna to Mayerling, but in the end I caught a local train from Meidling to Baden and started my bike ride there.
I thought that I had been to Baden during my student days, but nothing looked familiar as I biked from the station through the small (but pleasant) tourist town that does a brisk business in those “taking the waters”.
The GPS on my handlebars wasn’t always connecting to the satellites, so on a few wrong turns I ended up in spa parking lots, which had the heavy scent of sulphur.
Eventually I found the road headed west of town in the general direction Heiligenkreuz, where in the great cover-up that followed the Mayerling deaths, Mary was buried hastily in a community graveyard, to keep the press from asking too many questions about her death at the hands of the crown prince.
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It took me about an hour to ride to Heiligenkreuz, which was pretty much up a long incline from Baden. At one point I tired of the traffic on the main road and veered off onto some agricultural lanes, which in turn dumped me into a forest.
I recovered my bearings and rode into Heiligenkreuz, where in the town center there is an impressive Cistercian Abbey, complete with tickets, tours, and a gift shop.
For a while I thought that perhaps Habsburg imperial handlers had disposed of Mary’s body in the abbey’s small cemetery, but when I didn’t find her grave there, I asked one of the monks if he could direct me. He explained that the community cemetery was about a mile away, up another steep hill and down a small lane. Clearly, even today, the imperial embarrassment that was Mary Vetsera isn’t easy to find.
When you consider that the murder-suicide took place in 1889 and that the Habsburg empire collapsed in 1918, it’s impressive that Mayerling retains such a strong attachment to so many emotions.
I have read numerous accounts of the killings—one of the best being Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889—and there are many films devoted to the tragedy.
The French actor Charles Boyer starred in a 1936 version, and then in 1957 Audrey Hepburn played the doomed role of Mary Vetsera (Hepburn was over Mary’s pay grade), although the directors spared viewers the grisly head shot and only showed Mel Ferrer (as Crown Prince Rudolph) grasping for her lifeless hand.
In 1968, Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve took to the silver screen as the doomed couple, and in between there have been ballets, plays, operas, paintings, and made-for-TV specials.
The attraction is the death spiral of someone set to inherit, on the death of his father, Emperor Franz Josef, the following titles:
His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty
By the Grace of God Emperor of Austria
King of Hungary and Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria and Illyria;
King of Jerusalem, Archduke of Austria, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow, Duke of Lorraine, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, arniola and Bukovina;
Grand Prince of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia;
Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, ofAuschwitz and Sator, of Teschen, Friuli, Ragusa and Zara, Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gorizia and Gradisca;
Prince of Trento and Brixen;
Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia and Istria;
Count of Hohenembs, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenberg, etc., Lord of Trieste, of Cattaro and above the County of Windisch Grand Voivode in the Voivodina of Serbia
* * *
To remind myself of the story’s detail, I had on my Kindle Greg King’s and Penny Wilson’s Twilight of Empire: The Tragedy at Mayerling and the End of the Habsburgs, which was published in 2017.
The book examines a number of competing conspiracy theories (that Mary was pregnant when she died or that the German Chancellor Bismarck had the pro-Hungarian Rudolph killed), but mostly it is a fast-paced retelling of the events leading up to the fateful night when Rudolph first killed his lover Mary and then waited a number of hours beside her lifeless body to fulfill his end of the murder-suicide bargain.
As with other accounts, there’s a sense of doom—over Rudolph and Austro-Hungary—that is present in the book from its first pages, when the authors write: “The fall of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 left the Habsburgs as emperors of Austria and kings of Hungary, Lombardy, and Venice, a motley collection of lands artificially united beneath the yellow-and-black imperial banner and held together by the most fragile of political threads.”
Crown Prince Rudolph was the only son (he had a sister, Marie Valerie) of the unhappy marriage between the dour Emperor Franz-Josef I and his erratic, beautiful wife, Empress Elisabeth, often referred to as Sisi, who was the Princess Diana of her day (meaning, that she was glamorous, in the news, self-absorbed, and a wanderer).
Franz-Josef lived for shuffling imperial diktats at his desk and hunting, which he did in the company of other European monarchs. King and Wilson write: “Franz Josef lived in self-imposed isolation. Aside from shooting he had no real interests, dismissing most art, music, and literature as wastes of time.”
After some time in the marriage, Franz-Josef saw little of his wife who often stayed in other imperial palaces (notably Miramar in Trieste, where she could walk by the sea), but he was devoted to his mistress, Katharina Schratt, an actress with whom his royal majesty first became smitten on stage.
The imperial myth claims that their relationship was never consummated (which casts the emperor as a gentleman of the first rank), although King and Wilson quote another historian, Joan Haslip, who wrote: “One is inclined to doubt whether it was always so platonic.”
* * *
With his parents lost in their worlds of imperial solipsism, Rudolph grew up in the care of servants who indulged his every wish. From his father, he inherited a sense of royal entitlement, and from his mother a form of wayward narcissism, which together played themselves out in an endless series of love affairs even after he was married (to Princess Stéphanie of Belgium) and a lack of direction that made him endlessly question his own worth.
At birth he was the titular head of an Austrian regiment, and his education followed the playbook of European crown princes, with lots of Latin, prayers, and guns. That said, he grew up something of a rebel within the cold royal household. King and Wilson write:
Rudolf declared that he had “no sympathy whatever for the influence of the Church on the State,” and detested “all tendencies toward Church influence. I would much rather send my children to a school whose master is a Jew than to one whose headmaster is a clergyman.”
For someone growing up to take over the leadership of Catholic Austria, this was heresy, as was his advocacy within the hodgepodge empire of liberal reform and nationalistic expression. He also rebelled against his father by taking the Hungarian side in the endless disputes of the dual monarchy, and he had little time for Prussia’s militarism. King and Wilson write:
Yet the suggestion that Rudolf was murdered for political reasons has become fashionable in conspiratorial circles, and the finger of suspicion has long pointed toward Berlin and German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. This isn’t surprising: Rudolf’s antagonism toward Prussia was scarcely a secret. Like many Austrians, he despised Prussian aggression, growing militarism, and its humiliating usurpation of previous Habsburg dominance over European Germans. “Germany needs this alliance more than we do,” Rudolf once wrote to Szeps. Bismarck’s goal, he believed, was “to isolate Austria more and more from all other powers and make it dependent upon German help.” Bismarck, for his part, made no secret of the fact that he feared Rudolf’s eventual accession to the Habsburg throne. Although he praised the crown prince’s “mental powers and the maturity of his opinions and conceptions” to an Austrian official, privately he expressed concern over Rudolf’s “close connections with literati and journalists,” adding that “if the Crown Prince continues in this way it must fill us with apprehension for the future.”
Rudolph had the look of a future leader who might well bring down the house.
* * *
In the end what might well have doomed Rudolph is that he lacked a purpose in his life (as well it might be said of his father, even though he had an empire to run) other than to sleep with women and go shooting.
King and Wilson write: “If, as seems likely, Rudolf not only threw in his lot with the rebels in Budapest but also asked for an annulment—an unthinkable action for the future emperor of Austria-Hungary and crown prince of the proudly Catholic Habsburg dynasty—it only underlines just how unstable his thinking had become.”
Rudolf’s 1881 marriage to Princess Stéphanie produced a daughter, but then came to a grinding halt in 1886 when he infected his wife with gonorrhea, and he himself displayed many erratic mental symptoms of syphilis (an occupational hazard in some royal circles).
As the Austrian crown prince, he never lacked for women with whom to share champagne, but as his life began its spiraling decent he sought not just a lover but someone vulnerable who might join him on a one-way carriage ride to eternity.
