Free B008AITH44 EBOK by Brigitte Hamann

PREFACE
     
    T his book is the life story of a woman who refused to behave according to her rank. Drawing on remarkable self-confidence, she strove for and achieved the goal that it took the twentieth-century feminist movement to name “self-realization.”
    She played none of the roles assigned to her by tradition and her surroundings: not the role of loving and devoted wife, not the role of mother, not the role of principal figurehead in a gigantic empire. She insisted on her rights as an individual—and she prevailed. That her self-realization did not make her happy is the tragedy of her life—aside from the tragedies that befell her most immediate family, set in motion by her refusal to be co-opted. Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia (to list only her most important titles), was at heart a republican, calling the venerable monarchy the “skeleton of former splendor” and an oak tree that was bound to fall, since it had “outlived its usefulness” ( see here ). She excoriated the excesses of the aristocratic system, and she flouted kings and princes, as she had learned to do from her revered model and “master,” Heinrich Heine.
    Class consciousness was not in her nature, foreign to her to such a degree that in the end the Empress-Queen seemed an alien outsider at the court of Vienna, an irritant to the court society living by the traditional rules. This effect Elisabeth deliberately cultivated.
    On the one hand, as a proponent of democratic ideals, Elisabeth represents an anomaly (even a curiosity); on the other, her example above all illustrates the power of the antimonarchist ideas current in the late nineteenth century. These ideas did not stop short of princes, who were beginning to question the legitimacy of their (inherited rather than earned) elite positions. The remark Count Alexander Hübner entered in his diary on November 18, 1884, was surely true: “It is a fact that no one any longer believes in kings, and I do not know if they believe in themselves.” And Elisabeth’s friend, the poet Carmen Sylva (Queen Elisabeth of Romania), expressed the same belief even more bluntly: “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” ( see here ).
    This attitude gave rise to considerable conflicts in the area of class consciousness. For though the awareness of his “individuality” made the aristocrat who was touched by modern ideas willing to present himself as merely one among many equals (distinguished primarily by the middle-class virtues of “accomplishment” and “culture”), only too often he would have to recognize that he could not hold his own in the competition (at least not to an extent due his noble origins)—that his individual worth did not, therefore, coincide with his special social standing; these nobles understood that in the last resort they would leave nothing behind but a title they had not earned and a function whose value they did not acknowledge. This was the tragedy of Empress Elisabeth, as it was of her son, Rudolf.
    Elisabeth’s life is full of grim, even desperate efforts to gain recognition as an individual. Her first and most successful struggle was to be beautiful. The legendary beauty of Empress Elisabeth was in no way merely a gift of nature; it was also the result of rigorous self-control and lifelong discipline, which in the end became physical torment. In similar fashion she earned her reputation as an outstanding sportswoman, the top woman rider in hunts all over Europe during the 1870s. This was a form of fame that, like the fame of her beauty, could not but wane with increasing age, in spite of all her self-discipline. Her highest hopes for wresting renown from posterity lay in another direction: she would be known as an inspired poet. The evidence of her efforts—poems, hitherto unknown, covering more than five hundred pages, all written