The Empress Elizabeth of Austria
About this eBook
Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898) was the wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I, and thus Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Queen consort of Croatia and Bohemia.
Born into Bavarian royalty, Elisabeth (“Sisi”) enjoyed an informal upbringing before marrying Franz Joseph at the age of sixteen. The marriage thrust her into the much more formal Habsburg court life, for which she was ill-prepared and which she found uncongenial. Early in the marriage she was at odds with her mother-in-law, Princess Sophie, who took over the rearing of Elisabeth’s daughters, one of whom, Sophie, died in infancy.
The birth of a male heir, Rudolf, improved her standing at court considerably, but her health suffered under the strain, and she would often visit Hungary for its more relaxed environment. She came to develop a deep kinship with Hungary, and helped to bring about the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867.
The death of her only son Rudolf, and his mistress Mary Vetsera, in a murder-suicide tragedy at his hunting lodge at Mayerling in 1889 was a blow from which Elisabeth never recovered. She withdrew from court duties and travelled widely, unaccompanied by her family. She was obsessively concerned with maintaining her youthful figure and beauty, demanding to be sewn into her leather corsets and spending two or three hours a day on her coiffure.
While travelling in Geneva in 1898, she was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni who selected her because he had missed his chance to assassinate Prince Philippe, Duke of Orléans, and wanted to kill the next member of royalty that he saw.
Elisabeth was the longest serving Empress-consort of Austria, at 44 years.
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About the author
KARL TSCHUPPIK (26 June 1876 - 22 July 1937) was an Austrian journalist, feuilleton, publicist and writer.
He was born in Horowitz or Melnik, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (today Czech Republic). Following his high school graduation, he studied technical sciences at the Technical Universities of Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) and Vienna (Technical University of Vienna).
He worked for newspapers such as the Prague Tagblatt from 1898 to 1917 as an editor and editor, and published stories in numerous newspapers and magazines in Vienna and Berlin, mostly attributable to the left-wing intellectual spectrum. He was one of the most important Austrian publicists before 1938. His publications have received great acclaim and he is widely regarded amongst important contemporary Austrian journalists and journalists such as Max Brod, Joseph Roth and Friedrich Funder.
Tschuppik rejected national socialism, German nationalism as well as Austro-Fascism, and he was a frequent target for national-socialist propaganda among other publicists; his work described as “harmful and undesirable literature”, his name appeared on the first “Black List” published in 1933.
His other biographies include Francis Joseph I: The Downfall of an Empire (1930) and Ludendorff: The Tragedy of a Military Mind (1932). He published one novel, Ein Sohn aus gutem Hause (A Son from a Good Home) in 1937, which was made into a film by the same name in 1989 by Austrian film director Karin Brandauer.
Tschuppik died in Vienna in 1937 at the age of 61.
