I recently got round to visiting an exhibition in Berlin dedicated to one of my favourite proto-goth oddballs, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, a.k.a.. Sissi. Though small, it went some way to deconstructing the myths associated with Franz Joseph’s Bavarian-born consort. It was Sissi’s fanatical dedication to her own beauty which stood out, beauty which she worshipped “like a heathen his idols,” according to her niece. Looking out from official portraits with her radiant skin, torrents of chestnut hair and tiny waist, Her Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty seems to be saying “this doesn’t just happen, you know”. And it really, really didn’t: maintaining it all was a full time occupation.

The exhibition offered a few of Sissi’s patented skin creams to try on but overall it was disappointing when you think of what a truly immersive exhibit could offer: fun house mirrors for instant anorexia, crowds of virtual commoners for the visitor to haughtily ignore, computer-generated verse in the style of Sissi’s own angsty emo poetry. So if you really want to Sissi up your life, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Luckily with this lifestyle makeover you’re just 12 steps away from imperial and royal apostolic fabulosity:

1. Be nuts
   You may already be one of the millions of people suffering from Sissi Syndrome, a “lifestyle malady” which was “discovered” in 1998 and said to be characterised by inner emptiness masked by restless activity and the quest for physical perfection. That’s according to global pharmaceutical giant SmithKline Beecham, anyway, who – what luck! – also manufacture the “cure”. Apparently 3 million Germans suffer from Sissi Syndrome, but it was discredited by independent studies as “an invented disorder”. So while you can file it under “made-up shit to sell drugs”, it’s an appropriately modern homage to a woman whose life was bankrolled by the dying absolutism of the previous century but whose pathologies looked forward to the next…
2. Hit the gym

   © Schloß Schönbrunn Kultur- und Betriebsges.m.b.H.

   …and the exercise equipment which Sissi had installed in her Vienna apartments was just one sign of a sensibility which seems so much closer to our age than her own. This was one of the first private gyms in the world, where Sissi would work out for up to an hour a day in full corsetry.

3. Don’t have children
   Well of course Sissi did fulfil her dynastic obligation and have children, four of them in fact. But she was disgusted by childbearing, and never more rigorous with her diet and exercise than after a pregnancy. If left to her own devices there is little doubt that she would have remained childless.
4. Drink raw veal juice
   I haven’t eaten meat since 1993 and frankly I’d rather not know how exactly you juice veal, but this vile-sounding brew was just one of the quack diet potions which Sissi embraced.
5. Keep moving
   As well as her constant travels around Europe, Sissi would walk, obsessively, for hours at a time, or ride manically through the countryside. She desperately tried to outpace the pounds which refused to slip away as easily as they did in her youth. Her intensive regime was driven by depression as much as anything, but the black dog kept to her heels.
6. Eat sorbet
   As a young woman Sissi had a hearty appetite, but in later years she existed for long stretches on fruit, sorbet and milk to maintain her extraordinary 16-inch waist. One of the exhibits was a starched cloth garment I originally took for a large collar; it turns out it was meant to adorn her midriff.
7. Eat nothing
   You’re serious about this, right? Put down the fork, tubster. In her most extreme phases, Sissi exhibited what we would now regard as anorexia. She was renowned for her figure though it fell short of the zaftig proportions favoured by the age. Nothing, not even the empress’s beloved violet bon-bons, tasted as good as skinny felt.
8. Wrap up
   Sissi’s pores, at least, enjoyed a healthy diet. She wrapped herself in face masks of strawberries, honey and raw veal (again with the veal!) while she subjected herself to hot olive oil baths and body wraps of seaweed, sand or hay.
9. Wear black
   Sissi was enmeshed in grief for much of her life with loved ones dying at an alarming rate, and as protocol dictated she went into mourning for her son Rudolf, who died in a murder-suicide with his mistress in 1889. But when she was assassinated on this day in 1898 she was still in black, having no doubt discovered its slimming qualities in the interim.
10. Take some time for haircare (three hours a day should do it) Care of Sissi’s tumbling locks required a complicated ceremony of combing, brushing and massaging performed by gloved attendants who placed a white sheet on the floor to catch any stray hairs, which were subsequently catalogued and presented to the empress in a silver dish. Once a fortnight the floor-length tresses were washed in egg yolks and cognac.
11. Avoid commoners
    Sissi’s self-absorption eventually became so all-consuming that she barely even saw her husband let alone his subjects. To live in exile in a fantasy world and maintain her mystique meant not exposing herself to the judgment of the rabble. Unlike Diana, Sissi’s vanity didn’t require others to regard her as good or virtuous, and despite her isolated acts of impulsive charity she didn’t see herself as the People’s Empress any more than the people did. Her occasional visits to mental institutions and cholera hospitals had as much to do with ghoulishness as compassion.
12. Avoid the paparazzi
    One of the very few photos of Sissi in later years shows her on horseback with a fan shielding her face. So frustrated were photographers in their attempts to snap the aging empress that they were reduced to painting wrinkles on photos from her heyday; a kind of reverse Photoshopping. Once again Sissi was way ahead of her time, gripped as she was by a very contemporary amalgam of compulsive narcissism and obsessive secrecy. When it came to aging, her attitude was: pics or it didn’t happen.

The painting above depicts Elisabeth of Austria a.k.a. Sissi taking a stile in style, sidesaddle (à la Auntie Mame). If you’re quick you can put a bid on it; the painting is include in a fine art auction in Cambridge today and tomorrow. It’s not to be confused with another equestrian portrait of the empress, which was found hidden in an Irish kennel.

Sissi was renowned as one of the best horsewomen of her age, bringing to hunting and riding the manic energy and singlemindedness she brought to all her passions. She would drive her mount faster and faster, often leaving other members of her party thrown and wounded in their attempts to keep up. The empress, who courted oblivion as if it were a reluctant paramour, called one of her horses “Nihilist”.

Below, other depictions of Sissi on horseback.

Now Italy’s easternmost city, Trieste was once the primary seaport of the Austrian Empire. In 1859 Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, brother of Emperor Franz Joseph, commissioned a castle north-west of Trieste’s city centre, on an outcrop overlooking the Adriatic.

He and his wife Charlotte, daughter of the King of Belgium, moved into the still-unfinished Castello di Miramare, or Schloss Miramar as they knew it, in 1860. It was designed by Carl Junker, a largely forgotten Austrian architect who otherwise specialised in engineering projects. The serene, light-coloured stone of the castellated exterior stood in contrast to the heavy, neurotically over-decorated interior, a style then popular in Napoléon III’s France.

And it was the French emperor who triggered the chain of events that brought Miramare’s darkest association. Seeking control over Mexico, he convinced Franz Joseph to let him install Maximilian as emperor. Eager for some kind of meaningful role, Charlotte pressed her husband to accept.

And so in 1864 a Mexican delegation of dubious legitimacy arrived at Miramare to formally offer the crown, to be received in a bedroom because the only other sizable room available was monopolised by an immovable billiard table. A few days later and Maximilian and Charlotte, dressed in prescient mourning black, set off from Miramare in tears. Among the huge crowd was Maximilian’s cross-dressing brother Archduke Ludwig Viktor.

Even as the imperial project foundered and Maximilian was hung out to dry by the European powers, including his own brother, his mind wandered ever back to Miramare. He continued to send back plans for further building work and even plant specimens for the extensive landscaped gardens. Charlotte returned to Europe in 1866 to solicit aid. Unhinged by anxiety, she travelled to Rome to petition the Pope, and became so paranoid that she would only eat chickens which she kept for that purpose in her hotel room.

The following year, Maximilian was executed after a coup led by Benito Juárez. By now Charlotte was back at Miramare, but such was her fragility that her doctors didn’t dare inform her of Maximilian’s death for months. She spent the rest of her life commuting between lunacy and lucidity, only dying in 1927.

Sissi arriving at Miramar

It was one of the most absurd episodes in the gothic carnival of wretchedness that characterised the last few decades of Habsburg rule, and its memory hung heavy over Miramare. Maximilian’s sister-in-law Sissi (Empress Elisabeth) was a frequent visitor in the late 19th century as she criss-crossed Europe in search of…well, who knows?

Tragic destinies and hubris on an imperial scale proved irresistible themes to artist and proto-hippy Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach who stayed in Trieste in 1899. For him Maximilian was “the victim of his own ‘Christian’ imperial delusions”. He painted Miramare at least four times. His images are imbued with the same melancholic spirit as these lines about Miramare written by Trieste-born poet Theodor Däubler: “Thou shalt tremble deeply at thy emptiness/thou art already woven round with myth/the sea and thy mourning will endure”.

With the fall of the Austrian Empire at the end of World War One, Trieste suffered a decline in prestige and in the 20th century became better known for its literary associations, particularly the long period that James Joyce and his wife Nora spent there. Long afterwards Joyce wrote to Nora: “I long to see the lights twinkling along the riva as the train passes Miramar.”

In the 1930s Miramare was occupied by military commander Duke Amadeo of Savoy-Aosta, who left in 1937 to take up his post as Governor-General of Italian East Africa. Like Maximilian, he was also fated not to return from his absurd imperial adventure, dying in Nairobi in 1943.

The Castello di Miramare opened as a museum in 1955. In 1964 it featured in the German thriller Wartezimmer zum Jenseits (“Eternity’s waiting room”, released in the US as Mark of the Tortoise), based on an Edgar Wallace novel. The castle is meant to be the nerve centre of an international crime syndicate whose chieftain is – naturally – in a wheelchair. It’s not a great film by any means, but it does have Klaus Kinski and Hildegard Knef (what was I going to do, not watch it?), and exploits Miramare’s sinister presence to the full.

Jan Morris brilliantly evokes Trieste’s manifold layers of significance in her 2001 book Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, in which she describes the city as “an allegory of limbo” and Miramare as “a little like a romantic idealization of the empire itself, a fairy-tale mock fortress”. “It stands on its promontory weeping, and to my eyes even in the sunshine its walls are never sparkling. A pleasant park surrounds it, and its rooms are full of treasures, but nobody who goes there can fail to sense its numen of regret.”

The melancholy which is “Trieste’s chief rapture” according to Morris, continues to shroud the seaside Castello di Miramare.

The role of Bavarian king Ludwig II is a gift for any film actor. With lots of solo screen time you can really let loose with the anguished soliloquies and tempestuous mad scenes. You also get to show your range as you age up from the beautiful young king to the bloated Ludwig of later years (unless you get someone else in). There’s some pretty fancy scenery to chew as you wander distractedly through sumptuous reception rooms to a Wagner soundtrack, pausing for a bit of fruity eye contact with the help before succumbing to a violent death. The exact circumstances of that last scene (which occurred on this day in 1886) are still unknown so you can play it any way you like. Really, go nuts.

Ludwig is back at the end of this year in a new German production, a hundred years since his first film appearance, more or less. Here are ten milestones of the Bavarian king’s cinematic century:

Richard Wagner (1913)

Regarded as the first feature-length bio-pic, Richard Wagner was made to mark the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth. We know how the Nazis later appropriated his music, but the fate of two figures associated with the film is also illuminating: Jewish actor Ernst Reicher, who played Ludwig, was forced to emigrate in 1933, while director Carl Froelich, who also made the first German sound film Die Nacht gehört uns, would end up as the Nazis’ head of film.

Das Schweigen am Starnbergersee (1920)

In the first film centred on Ludwig, the king was played by Martin Wilhelm (young) and Ferdinand Bonn (old). The title (“The silence on Starnbergersee”) alludes to the scene of Ludwig’s mysterious death, dramatically depicted above. The following year director Rolf Raffé made a film about Ludwig’s cousin Sissi, which featured the Austrian Empress’s niece and confidant, Countess Larisch, as herself.

Ein königlicher Sonderling (1922)

“A royal eccentric” in English, this was an Austrian production, with the king played by the wonderfully named yet not at all Scandinavian Olaf Fjord. Director Otto Kreisler made his last film in 1925 which was also, incidentally, Anita Berber‘s last film.

Ludwig der Zweite, König von Bayern. Schicksal eines unglücklichen Menschen (1930)

A late silent film, “Ludwig the Second, King of Bavaria. Fate of an unfortunate man” was the translated title of this depiction whose script closely followed the king’s life. A little too closely, it seems; it was banned outright in Bavaria and only seen in a mangled, censored version elsewhere in Germany. The film features Max Schreck who terrified a generation in Nosferatu, while Wilhelm Dieterle directed and starred, later enjoying a successful Hollywood career in both those capacities.

Ludwig II. – Glanz und Ende eines Königs (1955)

The first Ludwig for a quarter-century was subtitled “glory and end of a king” and became the most successful German film of 1955, the same year which brought the first of three films presenting an idealised version of Ludwig’s cousin, Sissi. The script for Helmut Käutner’s film was submitted to surviving members of the Wittelsbach dynasty in exchange for permission to film in private locations. O.W. Fischer was the king and as for his even madder brother Otto…hmmm…a German post-war actor specialising in ostentatious mania? It could only be Klaus Kinski.

Ludwig – Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König (1972)

This “requiem for a virgin king” was directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and starred Harry Baer who penned a biography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder as well as appearing in a number of his fims. The divine Ingrid Caven, another long-time Fassbinder collaborator, was also on board. This wasn’t a conventional bio-pic by any means, but a stylised collision of history and fiction. Syberberg returned to Ludwig the following year for a television programme which looked at the king’s palaces through the eyes of the court cook.

Ludwig (1972)

Syberberg’s ambitious Requiem was poorly timed, coming out the same year as the pinnacle of Ludovican cinema. Visconti’s vast four-hour study is exhaustive and exhausting, though shorter, unsympathetically cut versions have been released over the years. It wasn’t universally admired, The New York Times‘ Vincent Canby calling it “opera buffa that doesn’t know it” with “an air of self-importance that it doesn’t deserve”. Ludwig is played by Visconti’s then lover Helmut Berger while Romy Schneider is his cousin Sissi, successfully exorcising her previous portrayals of the empress.

Wagner (1983)

Hungarian actor Lászlo Gálffi played Wagner’s royal patron, but really, who’s going to remember him in a Luvvie Olympics which included John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier and – as the composer himself – Richard Burton? Feast on the scenery, because the cast certainly did! Wagner was supposed to be a feature film but as the running time swelled to Ring-like proportions it was divided into episodes for television broadcast.

Ludwig 1881 (1992)

Just as Romy Schneider relished the opportunity to deconstruct Sissi in Visconti’s Ludwig, Helmut Berger unfolded without Visconti’s domineering presence in this rich, contemplative film. It depicts Ludwig’s journey through Switzerland in the company of actor Josef Kainz, who plays the king’s favourite parts from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell in historic locations. Ludwig 1881 benefits from concentrating on a limited time span rather than the whole of the king’s life.

Ludwig II. (2012)

Newcomer Sabin Tambrea is the titular king and Sebastian Schipper his older self in this film due out after Christmas. It’s been shot on location in the king’s fanciful palaces, and promises to highlight the young monarch’s cultural sophistication and forward-thinking ideals with direction by Marie Noelle and Peter Sehr, who was responsible for a 1993 study of Kaspar Hauser.

Because Ludwig II (featured yesterday) usually comes as half of a pathological double act with his cousin Elisabeth (“Sissi”), here are some depictions of her by Anselm Kiefer. The Austrian Empress is a recurring motif for the German contemporary artist, the earliest image a drawing dating from 1978. The most recent treatment is one of Kiefer’s signature large-scale relief works which was executed in 2006 and goes on display at Art Basel from today. Here Sissi is represented by her famous hair as well as a boat, standing in for both her incessant travels and the vessel she boarded shortly after she was mortally wounded in Geneva in 1898.

Further reading
Sissi & Romy
A Casati family tree
Dress-down Friday: Sissi
Thin white archduke
Rex Luna
Phantom of the empire
The 12-step Sissi lifestyle plan
Sissi on horseback
Places: Miramare

From May 2010, the pink sheep of the Habsburgs. You can also take a stroll down Ludwig-Viktor-Gasse here.

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Scary, no?

Did you ever have a dream where you’re walking through a closed-up wing of a crumbling palace and then you come to a door and you know you’re not supposed to open it but you do anyway? Well, no neither did I, but if you did, can’t you just imagine this wraith-like vision turning slowly towards you like something out of Poe as you’re too stunned and shocked to close the door again – ja? Can I help you?

The lugubrious, mildly terrifying young man returning your startled gaze is Archduke Ludwig Viktor – youngest brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph – who was born on this day in 1842. Thanks to inbreeding the Habsburgs generally found themselves on a physical attraction scale sliding from homely to hideous and Ludwig, bless him, fit right in among the portraits of his fugly forefathers.

It was a face only a mother could love and love him she did. After having produced an heir and two spares, Ludwig’s mutti ignored the fact that he wasn’t the girl she had longed for and dressed him like one anyway. If (and it’s a big if) you believe nurture trumps nature, the fact that this mama’s boy grew up as gay as a tree frog would offer you a satisfying narrative. Indeed Ludwig seemed determined to fulfil every quality the common person might ascribe to an “invert”: he was a flighty, pleasure-seeking reprobate who loved the theatre, collected art and antiques, wore women’s clothing, bitched incessantly and couldn’t be trusted with a secret. The imperial double-headed eagle was an apt symbol for the two-faced archduke. His sister-in-law Sissi was initially warmly disposed to him, until things she told him in confidence came back to her; finally, she refused to have a conversation with him unless a third party was present to verify it. Nonetheless the empress’s sister Sophie was picked out as a possible bride for Ludwig, but she rejected him (poor hapless Sophie would be engaged to and then dumped by another gay Ludwig, the so-called Mad King of Bavaria, and would eventually die in a fire).

No oil painting

The 21-year-old hedonist archduke about town needed a new crib, not least for his notorious parties, noted for both their extravagance and their low female turnout. He commissioned an Italianate palace on the new Ringstraße, the grand boulevard which sprang up on the site of Vienna’s recently razed city walls. It was the kind of ostentatious pile thought proper for a member of the imperial family, with statues of the great and good gracing the façade. The observant passer-by might have noticed among them a representation of 18^th century Franco-Austrian military commander Prince Eugene; a butch choice at first glance until you learn that Eugene was as fond of frocking up and man-love as Ludwig.

Though Ludwig’s own military career foundered, he always had an eye for a comely soldier, a weakness which triggered his expulsion from Vienna. His inclination had always been an open secret, and Franz Joseph had even joked that he should be given a ballerina as an adjutant to ensure nothing untoward would transpire. But Ludwig was getting reckless and had a reputation for spending hours in the Centralbad, a prestigious complex of Orientalist steam baths, where his (no doubt pruny) hands were apt to wander. The decisive incident came when Ludwig hit on an officer who, instead of removing the Imperial and Apostolic hand from his leg and uttering a polite but firm nein danke, gave the archduke a black eye. To avoid further scandal the emperor sent Ludwig into internal exile in his provincial bolthole, Schloss Kleßheim in Salzburg.

There, away from the strictures of court, he had a grand blue and white pool installed and would invite army officers to use it but – ach how silly of me! – forget to provide them with swimming costumes. But it wasn’t all pool parties and arrant campery; over time Ludwig became the embodiment of noblesse oblige, his charitable efforts for the Salzburgers making him the people’s archduke of hearts. And in the end the pink sheep of the Habsburgs outlived the empire – ha! – dying in 1919 on the first day of the conference in Versailles which would definitively abolish the old order of which Ludwig Viktor was one of the most entertaining representatives.

Ludwig’s Salzburg digs had a strange afterlife. A dance school run on Isadora Duncan’s pedagogic principles operated there in the 1920s, while the Nazis later took it over as a guest house and it was the scene of a number of meetings between Hitler and Mussolini (it was also riddled with listening devices). It now serves as Salzburg’s main casino.

Which, oddly, was what initially happened to the palace back in Vienna; before the First World War, Ludwig handed it over to the military for use as an officers’ casino. These days, if Ludwig’s ghost were to return he would have to make his way through – ugh – a TGI Friday’s on the ground floor but would be delighted to find much of the rest of the building given over to the city’s main theatre company.

And his ghost would feel right at home in the Centralbad; it is now Kaiserbründl, one of Europe’s most luxurious gay saunas.

From September 2010, Sissi’s double in the Double-Headed Eagle. More on Strange Flowers’ favourite Austrian empress: further cinematic echoes here and here, crepuscular glamour here, equestrian excellence here. You can also follow in her footsteps, admire some modern portraits and Sissi up your whole life.

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Among Jean Cocteau’s lesser-known films is L’aigle à deux têtes (“The Double-Headed Eagle”), a Ruritanian romance depicting “a queen with the soul of an anarchist and an anarchist with a royal soul”, made in 1948. As Cocteau freely admitted, his queen had “the naive pride, the grace, the fire, the courage, the elegance, the sense of destiny of Empress Elisabeth of Austria”, a.k.a. Sissi.

Sissi’s own era held little interest for her; she could barely muster contempt for her subjects and saw the empire as a “ruin”, predicting that it would die with her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph (in the event it only survived him by two years). But on this day in 1898, political currents for which Sissi generally gave little thought would prove to be her undoing. After visiting the Baroness de Rothschild, she was walking from her Geneva hotel to a steamship when she received a blade through the imperial bodice, delivered by an Italian anarchist. It was the quick, unforeseen death she had longed for but also seemed to be the fulfillment of some kind of Homeric curse, whose body count already included a son, a nephew, a cousin, two sisters and two brothers-in-law all lost to unnatural deaths, as well as her daughter Sophie who died in infancy.

It was this latter event which first inspired Sissi’s lifelong thoughts of suicide. One of her diary entries speaks of her inner darkness, “which absorbs light and never lets it go”. Perpetual longing for cherished oblivion accompanied Sissi’s ever longer periods abroad, ceaseless Flying Dutchman-style wanderings around the Mediterranean or foxhunting trips in England and Ireland.

Following the death of her son Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889 in an apparent suicide pact with his mistress, Sissi spent the rest of her days in black. She haunted Europe’s pleasure spots in widow’s weeds, a gothic freak show of peek-a-boo solipsism, a fan shielding her from the gaze of the hated hoi polloi. If she was seen at all it was in silhouette, like Marlene Dietrich in Maximilian Schell’s documentary, and for the same reason – neither could bear to disturb the earlier image the public had of her. Sissi was a 61-year-old great-grandmother at the time of her death, but if she is remembered as a young beauty it is because she refused to sit for photographers past the age of 30.

It is a testament to the bizarre existence Sissi led that what appear to be fanciful inventions on Cocteau’s part were actually accurate reflections of the empress’s life. His queen, played by Edwige Feuillère, is first seen taking frenzied delight in a tempest; in reality Sissi once crossed the English Channel during a fierce sea storm and had herself tied to the mast to better enjoy nature’s fury.

The vision of the queen taking to the rings for calisthenics is also straight from life. Sissi weighed herself daily and installed workout equipment among the baroque mouldings of her quarters in Vienna’s Hofburg palace, where a tutor memorably describes her dressed in a black silk dress decorated with ostrich feathers, lifting herself up on the rings, “something between a snake and a bird”. In later years Sissi would walk compulsively, up to nine hours a day, and her waist measured as little as 16 inches, giving her a figure less redolent of erotic allure as of the hourglass of a vanitas painting.

At another juncture, the queen fantasises about taking poison then galloping away, dying in the saddle. Sissi was admired as one of the greatest horsewomen in Europe, though here as in all her enthusiasms there was a compulsive edge; she drove her favourite horse, Nihilist, to frenzied limits and once enquired, “why can’t I break my neck at a fence and end all of it?”

Cocteau’s greatest insight was to recognise that Sissi’s most consuming passion was reserved for her own death. The personification of her demise is played by Jean Marais (warning: if you get hold of the DVD you may want to unplug your camp-o-meter before Marais’s entrance in lederhosen unless you want to be thrown across the room). After three days’ courtship her death duly arrives as a consummation.

The figure of Sissi, as we have already seen on Strange Flowers, became a kitschy confection in three films which had little do with her life, fixing a wholly distorted, whitewashed image of her in the public imagination. The trope of Sissi’s romance with death is picked up by the musical Elisabeth which, since its debut in 1992, has become the most successful German-language stage show ever, with performances all across Europe as well as Japan. While it seeks to recapture the darkness in Sissi’s life, its “Phantom of the Empire” style is necessarily a caricature bound by the mawkish conventions of musical theatre. It’s an ironically fitting epitaph, a populist approach which can be read as the public’s revenge for the disdain Sissi showed her imperial subjects in her lifetime: the empire strikes back.

An excerpt from L’aigle à deux têtes (no subtitles unfortunately):

Strange Flowers gots mad luv for L2. This example comes from August 2010, as does this snowbound trek around one of his palaces. Brian Sewell definitely gots mad luv as evidenced by this interview, and the camera can’t get enough of the Bavarian king as you can discover here and here.

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It’s been very German around here lately, hasn’t it? Four of the last five posts relate to natives of my host country, and today things take a further turn for the wurst as we visit the ultimate German eccentric of the last, oh, 200 years or so.

It’s hard to know what there is left to say about Bavarian king Ludwig II; Luchino Visconti’s sprawling four-hour 1972 epic Ludwig tells you all you need to know about him (and, frankly, quite a deal more). Ludwig continues to exert a fascination disproportionate to his political achievements and is today better remembered than most of the sabre-rattling Prussians, doughty Saxons and myriad dull princelets of the geo-political patchwork which would, during Ludwig’s reign, form the German Empire.

If you’re not familiar with Ludwig’s CV, here it is in outline. He was born on this day in 1845, and ascended the Bavarian throne in 1864, his subjects initially smitten with the handsome young king. But it soon became apparent Ludwig was more interested in his private obsessions than the drear business of ruling. Chief among the king’s enthusiasms was the composer Richard Wagner, on whom Ludwig lavished state funds.

In 1867, Ludwig was engaged to his cousin Sophie, sister of Sissi (Empress Elisabeth of Austria), but the engagement was broken off, with the real reason – Ludwig’s homosexuality – naturally figuring nowhere in official announcements. Ludwig became ever more withdrawn and stopped taking part in official functions. He spent enormous sums on fanciful palaces, much to the alarm of government officials. In 1886 he was deposed on flimsily substantiated grounds of insanity, and died by drowning a few days after his deposition in circumstances which have never been convincingly explained. The official verdict of murder-suicide (a doctor died with him) remains controversial.

It is those very castles which so distressed his courtiers which have ensured his posthumous legend. Superficially Ludwig and his kindred spirit Sissi may have adopted the frock-coats and crinolines of their more prosperous subjects, like many European royals chastened by almost a century of sporadic proletarian revolt. But both wilfully refused to conform to their roles and used their positions to retreat from the world and its nuisances, to construct their own fantasy kingdoms. “It is essential,” proclaimed Ludwig, “to create such paradises, such poetical sanctuaries where one can forget for a while the dreadful age in which we live”.

Ludwig’s “sanctuaries” included his imitation of Versailles at Herrenchiemsee, the less literal French Rococo pastiche of Linderhof, and – most famously – the Wagnerian medieval medley of Neuschwanstein, now visited by over a million people a year. His castles in the sky became castles of bricks and mortar, historicist confections removed from their apparent function for a ruler who wanted the trappings of kingship without the grunt work.

The enduring question about Ludwig remains: was he mad? Certainly building a to-scale replica of Versailles, the Death Star of the ancien régime, is something we might rather expect of an unhinged Central African despot than a constitutional monarch. And madness most definitely ran in the family; his brother Otto, for one, was literally barking mad (his impersonation of a dog was among the episodes which prompted his removal from public life).

Ludwig also had an obsessive need for solitude. One example among many: he had an elaborate mechanical table built which meant his food could be served without him coming into contact with servants (cf. Des Esseintes’ arm’s-length relations with the help in J.K. Huysmans’ A Rebours). He wished to be gloriously, utterly alone in a nocturnal world with only the ghosts of Wagnerian heroes and French monarchs for company.

All of this, along with his sexuality, was enough to have him labelled insane. But as he protested when confronted with the diagnosis, “How can you declare me insane? After all, you have never seen or examined me before.” A fair, and indeed lucid comment, you’d have to agree, and ultimately Sissi’s description of him as “only an eccentric who lived in a world of ideas” seems the most fitting.

Both Ludwig and Sissi took the abstractions of Romanticism and not only made them reality but practised them at the level of an extreme sport. In so doing they inspired the Decadent writers who furthered the Romantics’ cult of self. Ludwig, particularly, was a shibboleth of French Decadent sensibilities. Apart from Huysmans, Ludwig’s self-imposed exile to the dominion of dreams inspired writers such as Catulle Mendès, Paul Verlaine, Robert de Montesquiou and later Jean Cocteau and Philippe Jullian. Alongside his obvious appeal to such precious spirits, Ludwig arguably served as a prism for their fascination with an absolutism still too contentious to directly engage with in republican France.

In his time and after, Ludwig received numerous epithets, including The Dream King, The Swan King, The Virgin King and – less tactfully – The Mad King. Montesquiou imaginatively labelled him the “13^th Caesar”, but it is the poet’s description of him as Rex Luna which serves him best; not quite lunatic, but driven by compulsions which scorned the light of day, making sense only in the moonlit realm of reverie and illusion.

Sissi (Elisabeth) and Ludwig II should need no introduction to regular readers. The Austrian empress and the Bavarian king were cousins and – as we see below – might have been in-laws as well if Ludwig hadn’t broken off his engagement with Sissi’s sister Sophie. But even greater than bonds of blood and wedlock was their shared sensibility – wilful, reclusive, eccentric, otherworldly. This as much as what they did or said or created is what inspired writers and artists of their own and later ages, and it is above all these secret legacies which I have tried to map here. This requires some abridgment – see here, for example, for the full rundown of Ludwig-inspired cinema – but hopefully it captures the royal cousins’ major points of psychic intersection with kindred spirits.

click through for a more legible view

Further reading
Sissi on horseback, Anselm Kiefer | Elisabeth(s), The 12-step Sissi lifestyle plan, Sissi & Romy (incl. Romy Schneider), Phantom of the empire, Dress-down Friday: Sissi (Sissi)
Rex Luna, Let them eat kuchen, Sewell on Ludwig, Ludwig at the movies, An eternal mystery (Ludwig)
Thin white archduke, Ludwig-Viktor-Gasse (Archduke Ludwig Viktor)
Places: Miramare (a whole Habsburg clusterfumble)
Places: Vittorialie degli italiani, D’Annunzio’s Cave (Gabriele d’Annunzio)
The countess in the afterlife, A Casati family tree, A Casati picture gallery, Casati continues to captivate…, Strange Flowers guide to London: part 3, Requiem for a Marchesa, Dress-down Friday: Marchesa Casati (Marchesa Casati)
Dress-down Friday: Robert de Montesquiou, Places: Palais Rose, Le Vésinet (incl. Casati), The hands of Robert de Montesquiou, A Lorrain special, part 2 (Robert de Montesquiou)
Dress-down Friday: Bibi-la-Purée, Verlaine’s funeral, Strange Flowers guide to London: part 2 (Paul Verlaine)

We first encountered the work of American contemporary artist T. J. Wilcox on Paris’s Place Vendôme, where the artist imagined a larger-than-life Countess de Castiglione haunting her old ’hood. These similarly elemental photomontages pose one of two different images of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Sissi), pierced by an assassin’s blade, against sumptuous backdrops which include the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. Like Anselm Kiefer, Wilcox has repeatedly drawn on the reclusive Habsburg; the earliest of these images dates from 2007, the most recent was executed earlier this year.

Further reading
Places: Place Vendôme (T.J. Wilcox)
Sissi on horseback, Anselm Kiefer | Elisabeth(s), The 12-step Sissi lifestyle plan, Sissi & Romy, Phantom of the empire, Dress-down Friday: Sissi, Circles: Ludwig II/Sissi (Sissi)

Sissi-nal greetings from Strange Flowers and everyone’s favourite emo Empress, Elisabeth of Austria, born on this silent night in 1837. Thanks for your interest throughout the year and we look forward to seeing you back here in 2014.

Further reading
Phantom of the empire
The 12-step Sissi lifestyle plan
Dress-down Friday: Sissi
Thin white archduke
A Casati family tree
Sissi & Romy
Sissi on horseback
Places: Miramare
Anselm Kiefer | Elisabeth(s)
Circles: Ludwig II/Sissi
T.J. Wilcox | Sissi(s)

In honour of the Chinese New Year and the Year of the Horse which begins today, here is a look at some of our favourite strange flowers in equestrian elegance mode.  There’s Renée Sintenis (again), Hermann Pückler-Muskau in an early drag race with a coach, while Lord Berners, ever the individualist, has decided to paint rather than ride his mount. Sissi‘s imperial sidesaddle glamour could never be encompassed by just one post; find more here.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Count D’Orsay

Lady Hester Stanhope

Gabriele d’Annunzio

Renée Sintenis

Lord Berners

H.D.

Ludwig II

Natalie Barney

Hermann von Pückler-Muskau

Sissi

Strange Flowers has a lot of love for this Wurst-ed portrait of Sissi reflecting the stirring events of the weekend (found here, but it’s unclear whom we should thank for the image…I will update here if I find out).

Pity the poor old Marchesa Casati, just lounging about there in the past being her reliably daft self, her eternal repose interrupted twice a year as fashion designers – on deadline, naturally, and not even stopping for tea – dash out of the present and strip her of surplus finery with which to pad out their collections. Beginning with John Galliano in the late 1990s, it seems most major designers have paraphrased her dark enchantments at some point (not least the label named for her), attempting to imitate the inimitable, a paradoxical process covered at greater length here.

Further pieces of the Marchesa littered about the present can be found in a recent book about her son-in-law, Jack Hastings, the “Red Earl“, as well as a film hommage to Jean Cocteau. Right now, however, the best place for an unmediated hit of Casatian wonder is in Venice, once the Marchesa’s home, where the Palazzo Fortuny is presenting an exhibition which promises to “immerse the visitor in the atmosphere of the Divine Marchesa’s life” by way of numerous portraits, personal effects and of course clothes. As the exhibition reflects, Casati’s self-willed singularity wasn’t entirely without precedent, and she had her own dead dame muses, particularly the Countess de Castiglione and Elisabeth, a.k.a. Sissi (that’s her burlesquing the Austrian empress above, in a photograph by Man Ray). The latter, as it happens, has her own exhibition in the Hofburg which pays hommage (how about I just stop using that word now?) to her wardrobe and runs until her birthday, Christmas Eve.

The Marchesa is naturally not the only quirky old broad to appear on the runways. The recent spate of ready-to-wear shows alone has given us Nancy Cunard, Marjorie Cameron and Annemarie Schwarzenbach (the latter coming from the house if not the hand of Jil Sander). Berlin-based maker of ladies’ underthings Lost in Wonderland recently issued a range inspired by great danseues of yore; their references are shameless Strange Flowers bait, featuring Anita Berber, Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan and Valeska Gert.

Finally, while we’re in a fashiony kind of mood, I urge you to read the recent-ish article about Nicolas de Gunzburg, socialite/arthouse ghoul/glossy mag luminary (and a mentor to the recently departed Oscar de la Renta). It’s one of those “partygoers of yesteryear” pieces Vanity Fair uses to soften the transition from its puddle-deep cover stories on the celebrity du jour to the long-winded forensic scandal reports templated by the late Dominick Dunne. I’ve always had a soft spot for ‘Niki’ Gunzburg, but was won over entirely by this reported exchange with Diana Vreeland: “Vreeland once inquired of Niki, ‘What is the name of the Seventh Avenue designer who hates me so?’—to which he replied, ‘Legion.'”

Among Jean Cocteau’s lesser-known films is L’aigle à deux têtes (“The Double-Headed Eagle”), a Ruritanian romance depicting “a queen with the soul of an anarchist and an anarchist with a royal soul”, made in 1948. As Cocteau freely admitted, his queen had “the naive pride, the grace, the fire, the courage, the elegance, the sense of destiny of Empress Elisabeth of Austria”, a.k.a. Sissi.

Sissi’s own era held little interest for her; she could barely muster contempt for her subjects and saw the empire as a “ruin”, predicting that it would die with her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph (in the event it only survived him by two years). But on this day in 1898, political currents for which Sissi generally gave little thought would prove to be her undoing. After visiting the Baroness de Rothschild, she was walking from her Geneva hotel to a steamship when she received a blade through the imperial bodice, delivered by an Italian anarchist. It was the quick, unforeseen death she had longed for but also seemed to be the fulfillment of some kind of Homeric curse, whose body count already included a son, a nephew, a cousin, two sisters and two brothers-in-law all lost to unnatural deaths, as well as her daughter Sophie who died in infancy.

It was this latter event which first inspired Sissi’s lifelong thoughts of suicide. One of her diary entries speaks of her inner darkness, “which absorbs light and never lets it go”. Perpetual longing for cherished oblivion accompanied Sissi’s ever longer periods abroad, ceaseless Flying Dutchman-style wanderings around the Mediterranean or foxhunting trips in England and Ireland.

Following the death of her son Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889 in an apparent suicide pact with his mistress, Sissi spent the rest of her days in black. She haunted Europe’s pleasure spots in widow’s weeds, a gothic freak show of peek-a-boo solipsism, a fan shielding her from the gaze of the hated hoi polloi. If she was seen at all it was in silhouette, like Marlene Dietrich in Maximilian Schell’s documentary, and for the same reason – neither could bear to disturb the earlier image the public had of her. Sissi was a 61-year-old great-grandmother at the time of her death, but if she is remembered as a young beauty it is because she refused to sit for photographers past the age of 30.

It is a testament to the bizarre existence Sissi led that what appear to be fanciful inventions on Cocteau’s part were actually accurate reflections of the empress’s life. His queen, played by Edwige Feuillère, is first seen taking frenzied delight in a tempest; in reality Sissi once crossed the English Channel during a fierce sea storm and had herself tied to the mast to better enjoy nature’s fury.

The vision of the queen taking to the rings for calisthenics is also straight from life. Sissi weighed herself daily and installed workout equipment among the baroque mouldings of her quarters in Vienna’s Hofburg palace, where a tutor memorably describes her dressed in a black silk dress decorated with ostrich feathers, lifting herself up on the rings, “something between a snake and a bird”. In later years Sissi would walk compulsively, up to nine hours a day, and her waist measured as little as 16 inches, giving her a figure less redolent of erotic allure as of the hourglass of a vanitas painting.

At another juncture, the queen fantasises about taking poison then galloping away, dying in the saddle. Sissi was admired as one of the greatest horsewomen in Europe, though here as in all her enthusiasms there was a compulsive edge; she drove her favourite horse, Nihilist, to frenzied limits and once enquired, “why can’t I break my neck at a fence and end all of it?”

Cocteau’s greatest insight was to recognise that Sissi’s most consuming passion was reserved for her own death. The personification of her demise is played by Jean Marais (warning: if you get hold of the DVD you may want to unplug your camp-o-meter before Marais’s entrance in lederhosen unless you want to be thrown across the room). After three days’ courtship her death duly arrives as a consummation.

The figure of Sissi, as we have already seen on Strange Flowers, became a kitschy confection in three films which had little do with her life, fixing a wholly distorted, whitewashed image of her in the public imagination. The trope of Sissi’s romance with death is picked up by the musical Elisabeth which, since its debut in 1992, has become the most successful German-language stage show ever, with performances all across Europe as well as Japan. While it seeks to recapture the darkness in Sissi’s life, its “Phantom of the Empire” style is necessarily a caricature bound by the mawkish conventions of musical theatre. It’s an ironically fitting epitaph, a populist approach which can be read as the public’s revenge for the disdain Sissi showed her imperial subjects in her lifetime: the empire strikes back.

An excerpt from L’aigle à deux têtes (no subtitles unfortunately):

I recently got round to visiting an exhibition in Berlin dedicated to one of my favourite proto-goth oddballs, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, a.k.a.. Sissi. Though small, it went some way to deconstructing the myths associated with Franz Joseph’s Bavarian-born consort. It was Sissi’s fanatical dedication to her own beauty which stood out, beauty which she worshipped “like a heathen his idols,” according to her niece. Looking out from official portraits with her radiant skin, torrents of chestnut hair and tiny waist, Her Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty seems to be saying “this doesn’t just happen, you know”. And it really, really didn’t: maintaining it all was a full time occupation.

The exhibition offered a few of Sissi’s patented skin creams to try on but overall it was disappointing when you think of what a truly immersive exhibit could offer: fun house mirrors for instant anorexia, crowds of virtual commoners for the visitor to haughtily ignore, computer-generated verse in the style of Sissi’s own angsty emo poetry. So if you really want to Sissi up your life, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Luckily with this lifestyle makeover you’re just 12 steps away from imperial and royal apostolic fabulosity:

1. Be nuts
   You may already be one of the millions of people suffering from Sissi Syndrome, a “lifestyle malady” which was “discovered” in 1998 and said to be characterised by inner emptiness masked by restless activity and the quest for physical perfection. That’s according to global pharmaceutical giant SmithKline Beecham, anyway, who – what luck! – also manufacture the “cure”. Apparently 3 million Germans suffer from Sissi Syndrome, but it was discredited by independent studies as “an invented disorder”. So while you can file it under “made-up shit to sell drugs”, it’s an appropriately modern homage to a woman whose life was bankrolled by the dying absolutism of the previous century but whose pathologies looked forward to the next…
2. Hit the gym

   © Schloß Schönbrunn Kultur- und Betriebsges.m.b.H.

   …and the exercise equipment which Sissi had installed in her Vienna apartments was just one sign of a sensibility which seems so much closer to our age than her own. This was one of the first private gyms in the world, where Sissi would work out for up to an hour a day in full corsetry.

3. Don’t have children
   Well of course Sissi did fulfil her dynastic obligation and have children, four of them in fact. But she was disgusted by childbearing, and never more rigorous with her diet and exercise than after a pregnancy. If left to her own devices there is little doubt that she would have remained childless.
4. Drink raw veal juice
   I haven’t eaten meat since 1993 and frankly I’d rather not know how exactly you juice veal, but this vile-sounding brew was just one of the quack diet potions which Sissi embraced.
5. Keep moving
   As well as her constant travels around Europe, Sissi would walk, obsessively, for hours at a time, or ride manically through the countryside. She desperately tried to outpace the pounds which refused to slip away as easily as they did in her youth. Her intensive regime was driven by depression as much as anything, but the black dog kept to her heels.
6. Eat sorbet
   As a young woman Sissi had a hearty appetite, but in later years she existed for long stretches on fruit, sorbet and milk to maintain her extraordinary 16-inch waist. One of the exhibits was a starched cloth garment I originally took for a large collar; it turns out it was meant to adorn her midriff.
7. Eat nothing
   You’re serious about this, right? Put down the fork, tubster. In her most extreme phases, Sissi exhibited what we would now regard as anorexia. She was renowned for her figure though it fell short of the zaftig proportions favoured by the age. Nothing, not even the empress’s beloved violet bon-bons, tasted as good as skinny felt.
8. Wrap up
   Sissi’s pores, at least, enjoyed a healthy diet. She wrapped herself in face masks of strawberries, honey and raw veal (again with the veal!) while she subjected herself to hot olive oil baths and body wraps of seaweed, sand or hay.
9. Wear black
   Sissi was enmeshed in grief for much of her life with loved ones dying at an alarming rate, and as protocol dictated she went into mourning for her son Rudolf, who died in a murder-suicide with his mistress in 1889. But when she was assassinated on this day in 1898 she was still in black, having no doubt discovered its slimming qualities in the interim.
10. Take some time for haircare (three hours a day should do it) Care of Sissi’s tumbling locks required a complicated ceremony of combing, brushing and massaging performed by gloved attendants who placed a white sheet on the floor to catch any stray hairs, which were subsequently catalogued and presented to the empress in a silver dish. Once a fortnight the floor-length tresses were washed in egg yolks and cognac.
11. Avoid commoners
    Sissi’s self-absorption eventually became so all-consuming that she barely even saw her husband let alone his subjects. To live in exile in a fantasy world and maintain her mystique meant not exposing herself to the judgment of the rabble. Unlike Diana, Sissi’s vanity didn’t require others to regard her as good or virtuous, and despite her isolated acts of impulsive charity she didn’t see herself as the People’s Empress any more than the people did. Her occasional visits to mental institutions and cholera hospitals had as much to do with ghoulishness as compassion.
12. Avoid the paparazzi
    One of the very few photos of Sissi in later years shows her on horseback with a fan shielding her face. So frustrated were photographers in their attempts to snap the aging empress that they were reduced to painting wrinkles on photos from her heyday; a kind of reverse Photoshopping. Once again Sissi was way ahead of her time, gripped as she was by a very contemporary amalgam of compulsive narcissism and obsessive secrecy. When it came to aging, her attitude was: pics or it didn’t happen.

The painting above depicts Elisabeth of Austria a.k.a. Sissi taking a stile in style, sidesaddle (à la Auntie Mame). If you’re quick you can put a bid on it; the painting is included in a fine art auction in Cambridge today and tomorrow. It’s not to be confused with another equestrian portrait of the empress, which was found hidden in an Irish kennel.

Sissi was renowned as one of the best horsewomen of her age, bringing to hunting and riding the manic energy and singlemindedness she brought to all her passions. She would drive her mount faster and faster, often leaving other members of her party thrown and wounded in their attempts to keep up. The empress, who courted oblivion as if it were a reluctant paramour, called one of her horses “Nihilist”.

Below, other depictions of Sissi on horseback.

Now Italy’s easternmost city, Trieste was once the primary seaport of the Austrian Empire. In 1859 Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, brother of Emperor Franz Joseph, commissioned a castle north-west of Trieste’s city centre, on an outcrop overlooking the Adriatic.

He and his wife Charlotte, daughter of the King of Belgium, moved into the still-unfinished Castello di Miramare, or Schloss Miramar as they knew it, in 1860. It was designed by Carl Junker, a largely forgotten Austrian architect who otherwise specialised in engineering projects. The serene, light-coloured stone of the castellated exterior stood in contrast to the heavy, neurotically over-decorated interior, a style then popular in Napoléon III’s France.

And it was the French emperor who triggered the chain of events that brought Miramare’s darkest association. Seeking control over Mexico, he convinced Franz Joseph to let him install Maximilian as emperor. Eager for some kind of meaningful role, Charlotte pressed her husband to accept.

And so in 1864 a Mexican delegation of dubious legitimacy arrived at Miramare to formally offer the crown, to be received in a bedroom because the only other sizable room available was monopolised by an immovable billiard table. A few days later and Maximilian and Charlotte, dressed in prescient mourning black, set off from Miramare in tears. Among the huge crowd was Maximilian’s cross-dressing brother Archduke Ludwig Viktor.

Even as the imperial project foundered and Maximilian was hung out to dry by the European powers, including his own brother, his mind wandered ever back to Miramare. He continued to send back plans for further building work and even plant specimens for the extensive landscaped gardens. Charlotte returned to Europe in 1866 to solicit aid. Unhinged by anxiety, she travelled to Rome to petition the Pope, and became so paranoid that she would only eat chickens which she kept for that purpose in her hotel room.

The following year, Maximilian was executed after a coup led by Benito Juárez. By now Charlotte was back at Miramare, but such was her fragility that her doctors didn’t dare inform her of Maximilian’s death for months. She spent the rest of her life commuting between lunacy and lucidity, only dying in 1927.

Sissi arriving at Miramar

It was one of the most absurd episodes in the gothic carnival of wretchedness that characterised the last few decades of Habsburg rule, and its memory hung heavy over Miramare. Maximilian’s sister-in-law Sissi (Empress Elisabeth) was a frequent visitor in the late 19th century as she criss-crossed Europe in search of…well, who knows?

Tragic destinies and hubris on an imperial scale proved irresistible themes to artist and proto-hippy Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach who stayed in Trieste in 1899. For him Maximilian was “the victim of his own ‘Christian’ imperial delusions”. He painted Miramare at least four times. His images are imbued with the same melancholic spirit as these lines about Miramare written by Trieste-born poet Theodor Däubler: “Thou shalt tremble deeply at thy emptiness/thou art already woven round with myth/the sea and thy mourning will endure”.

With the fall of the Austrian Empire at the end of World War One, Trieste suffered a decline in prestige and in the 20th century became better known for its literary associations, particularly the long period that James Joyce and his wife Nora spent there. Long afterwards Joyce wrote to Nora: “I long to see the lights twinkling along the riva as the train passes Miramar.”

In the 1930s Miramare was occupied by military commander Duke Amadeo of Savoy-Aosta, who left in 1937 to take up his post as Governor-General of Italian East Africa. Like Maximilian, he was also fated not to return from his absurd imperial adventure, dying in Nairobi in 1943.

The Castello di Miramare opened as a museum in 1955. In 1964 it featured in the German thriller Wartezimmer zum Jenseits (“Eternity’s waiting room”, released in the US as Mark of the Tortoise), based on an Edgar Wallace novel. The castle is meant to be the nerve centre of an international crime syndicate whose chieftain is – naturally – in a wheelchair. It’s not a great film by any means, but it does have Klaus Kinski and Hildegard Knef (what was I going to do, not watch it?), and exploits Miramare’s sinister presence to the full.

Jan Morris brilliantly evokes Trieste’s manifold layers of significance in her 2001 book Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, in which she describes the city as “an allegory of limbo” and Miramare as “a little like a romantic idealization of the empire itself, a fairy-tale mock fortress”. “It stands on its promontory weeping, and to my eyes even in the sunshine its walls are never sparkling. A pleasant park surrounds it, and its rooms are full of treasures, but nobody who goes there can fail to sense its numen of regret.”

The melancholy which is “Trieste’s chief rapture” according to Morris, continues to shroud the seaside Castello di Miramare.

The role of Bavarian king Ludwig II is a gift for any film actor. With lots of solo screen time you can really let loose with the anguished soliloquies and tempestuous mad scenes. You also get to show your range as you age up from the beautiful young king to the bloated Ludwig of later years (unless you get someone else in). There’s some pretty fancy scenery to chew as you wander distractedly through sumptuous reception rooms to a Wagner soundtrack, pausing for a bit of fruity eye contact with the help before succumbing to a violent death. The exact circumstances of that last scene (which occurred on this day in 1886) are still unknown so you can play it any way you like. Really, go nuts.

Ludwig is back at the end of this year in a new German production, a hundred years since his first film appearance, more or less. Here are ten milestones of the Bavarian king’s cinematic century:

Richard Wagner (1913)

Regarded as the first feature-length bio-pic, Richard Wagner was made to mark the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth. We know how the Nazis later appropriated his music, but the fate of two figures associated with the film is also illuminating: Jewish actor Ernst Reicher, who played Ludwig, was forced to emigrate in 1933, while director Carl Froelich, who also made the first German sound film Die Nacht gehört uns, would end up as the Nazis’ head of film.

Das Schweigen am Starnbergersee (1920)

In the first film centred on Ludwig, the king was played by Martin Wilhelm (young) and Ferdinand Bonn (old). The title (“The silence on Starnbergersee”) alludes to the scene of Ludwig’s mysterious death, dramatically depicted above. The following year director Rolf Raffé made a film about Ludwig’s cousin Sissi, which featured the Austrian Empress’s niece and confidant, Countess Larisch, as herself.

Ein königlicher Sonderling (1922)

“A royal eccentric” in English, this was an Austrian production, with the king played by the wonderfully named yet not at all Scandinavian Olaf Fjord. Director Otto Kreisler made his last film in 1925 which was also, incidentally, Anita Berber‘s last film.

Ludwig der Zweite, König von Bayern. Schicksal eines unglücklichen Menschen (1930)

A late silent film, “Ludwig the Second, King of Bavaria. Fate of an unfortunate man” was the translated title of this depiction whose script closely followed the king’s life. A little too closely, it seems; it was banned outright in Bavaria and only seen in a mangled, censored version elsewhere in Germany. The film features Max Schreck who terrified a generation in Nosferatu, while Wilhelm Dieterle directed and starred, later enjoying a successful Hollywood career in both those capacities.

Ludwig II. – Glanz und Ende eines Königs (1955)

The first Ludwig for a quarter-century was subtitled “glory and end of a king” and became the most successful German film of 1955, the same year which brought the first of three films presenting an idealised version of Ludwig’s cousin, Sissi. The script for Helmut Käutner’s film was submitted to surviving members of the Wittelsbach dynasty in exchange for permission to film in private locations. O.W. Fischer was the king and as for his even madder brother Otto…hmmm…a German post-war actor specialising in ostentatious mania? It could only be Klaus Kinski.

Ludwig – Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König (1972)

This “requiem for a virgin king” was directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and starred Harry Baer who penned a biography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder as well as appearing in a number of his fims. The divine Ingrid Caven, another long-time Fassbinder collaborator, was also on board. This wasn’t a conventional bio-pic by any means, but a stylised collision of history and fiction. Syberberg returned to Ludwig the following year for a television programme which looked at the king’s palaces through the eyes of the court cook.

Ludwig (1972)

Syberberg’s ambitious Requiem was poorly timed, coming out the same year as the pinnacle of Ludovican cinema. Visconti’s vast four-hour study is exhaustive and exhausting, though shorter, unsympathetically cut versions have been released over the years. It wasn’t universally admired, The New York Times‘ Vincent Canby calling it “opera buffa that doesn’t know it” with “an air of self-importance that it doesn’t deserve”. Ludwig is played by Visconti’s then lover Helmut Berger while Romy Schneider is his cousin Sissi, successfully exorcising her previous portrayals of the empress.

Wagner (1983)

Hungarian actor Lászlo Gálffi played Wagner’s royal patron, but really, who’s going to remember him in a Luvvie Olympics which included John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier and – as the composer himself – Richard Burton? Feast on the scenery, because the cast certainly did! Wagner was supposed to be a feature film but as the running time swelled to Ring-like proportions it was divided into episodes for television broadcast.

Ludwig 1881 (1992)

Just as Romy Schneider relished the opportunity to deconstruct Sissi in Visconti’s Ludwig, Helmut Berger unfolded without Visconti’s domineering presence in this rich, contemplative film. It depicts Ludwig’s journey through Switzerland in the company of actor Josef Kainz, who plays the king’s favourite parts from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell in historic locations. Ludwig 1881 benefits from concentrating on a limited time span rather than the whole of the king’s life.

Ludwig II. (2012)

Newcomer Sabin Tambrea is the titular king and Sebastian Schipper his older self in this film due out after Christmas. It’s been shot on location in the king’s fanciful palaces, and promises to highlight the young monarch’s cultural sophistication and forward-thinking ideals with direction by Marie Noelle and Peter Sehr, who was responsible for a 1993 study of Kaspar Hauser.

Happy new year!

Our annual look at forthcoming books is…forthcoming. Naturally the quixotic nature of publishing schedules is such that you can miss a lot from a January vantage point, and it strikes me that I should really do this twice a year. Meanwhile, here is a handful of late 2016 titles that may be of interest.

A sense of place is the common denominator in the majority of these titles, a number of them dwelling on the city and its secrets. Franz Hessel’s recently translated Walking in Berlin presented one key to these secrets in the person of le flâneur. But what of la flâneuese? Is the unmediated, unplanned exploration of the urban environment a solely masculine prerogative? In 2008, Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough’s The Invisible Flâneuse? offered a tentative, academic reply. An emphatic non is the answer supplied by Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, subtitled Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, out since mid-year in the UK and due in late February in the US. In a spirited text, Elkin uses examples as diverse as Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Martha Gellhorn and Sophie Calle to illustrate the worlds encountered by women on foot.

A more digressive city stroll comes in Nancy Cunard‘s “Parallax”, included in the collection Selected Poems from Carcanet Press. The writer and publisher’s indelible image is far more present in our day than her work. This volume is therefore a timely reminder that Cunard is not just handy for padding out your “bracelet ideas” Pinterest board. That those prodigiously ivoried arms were also known to move across paper, work the presses and raise themselves in righteous activism is too readily forgotten. I include this also as a note-to-self to share with you some images of Cunard’s childhood home which I visited last summer.

The perils and pleasures awaiting the unwary at large in the metropolis are sketched in Scott Spector’s Violent Sensations. This is a scholarly text built around an irresistible set of keywords, its subtitle of Sex, Crime & Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914 depositing it squarely in Strange Flowers’ sphere of interest. It contrasts the self-image of a rational, industrialising society with the chaos that re-emerges in the form of unruly desires and criminal savagery. There is much to recommend Spector’s book, particularly its fearless collapsing of academic compartments. One quibble from this reader is that it too readily conflates the abstractions of Decadent literary themes – which were only ever of interest to a small, rarefied subset of the educated public – with the often brutal, real-life convulsions of societies in flux.

These “Decadent literary themes” were very much the focus of Nicole Albert’s 2005 book Saphisme et décadence dans Paris fin-de-siècle. Recently translated by Nancy Erber and William A. Peniston and published by Harrington Park Press, it comes to as as Lesbian Decadence. Here the English-language reader discovers that love between women was an idée fixe of French literary Decadence, but generally broached by those who were themselves alien to the experience (men, in the main). Consequently, the approach of these works ranges from censorious to fetishistic, appalled to inspired. Speaking of Belle Époque preoccupations…

One thing that surprised me on my first trip to Paris many lunes ago was the huge amount of esoteric literature available from the Seine-side bouqinistes and Left Bank bookshops. Hermetic enquiry was never entirely erased from the crucible of Enlightenment rationalism. In Occult Paris, Tobias Churton shows “how a wide variety of Theosophists, Rosicrucians, Martinists, Freemasons, Gnostics, and neo-Cathars called fin-de-siècle Paris home”. It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the conjunction of time, place and subject matter that the singular figure of Joséphin Péladan features prominently. You may remember Tobias Churton as our guide to Aleister Crowley’s Berlin and may thus be interested to know that he has a similar study of the Great Beast in America under way.

It’s been more than half a decade since the name Theodore Wratislaw appeared in these pages. He was, as I wrote then, “at once one of the most emblematic of the English 1890s poets and one of the most obscure”. Now, more than 80 years after his death, the veil of obscurity lifts with the publication of D.J. Sheppard’s Theodore Wratislaw: Fragments of a Life, through Rivendale Press. Sheppard up-ends the suspicion that Wratislaw was a timid parvenu toying with modish themes. In fact the writer’s mental turmoil meant that “Wratislaw’s struggle was to maintain some semblance of bourgeois respectability rather than to escape it”. Benefiting from access to previously unpublished documents – including Wratislaw’s unfinished memoirs – it also carries a seal of approval from no less a Yellow Decade aficionado than the brilliant Barry Humphries.

More late Victorian literary curios in Simon Goldhill’s collective biography of Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his offspring. Like the Manns, the Benson children came in a six-pack of personal eccentricity and were, as the book’s title avers, A Very Queer Family Indeed. “The Archbishop and his wife had six children,” we learn, “none of whom ever had heterosexual intercourse, as far as we can tell; certainly none of them ever married.” They included E.F. Benson, author of the Mapp and Lucia books, and R.H. Benson, Frederick Rolfe‘s ally-turned-adversary, best known as the author of Lord of the World, a highly idiosyncratic piece of speculative fiction.

Even further off-road: Peter Owen Publishers, whose namesake sadly died in 2016, recently issued two prose works by artist Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988). Colquhoun was better known as a painter but in The Crying of the Wind and The Living Stones she records her discoveries in Ireland and Cornwall, respectively. Each volume comes with a foreword by Stewart Lee (and yes, for the British readers – it is the Clarkson-baiting comic). Cenotaph South, from Penned in the Margins, is perhaps an even more left-field choice, which I include partly because I once lived near Nunhead Cemetery which is the book’s focal point. In a highly personal journey through this south-east London resting place and its surrounds, author Chris McCabe discovers fellow poets and hidden histories amid the headstones and the ivy.

Finally, our sole fictional selection comes in the form of Linda Stift’s The Empress and the Cake in Jamie Bulloch’s translation, available through Pereine Press. The female protagonist of this dark, perverse tale “lives with her servant in an apartment full of bizarre souvenirs” and may in fact be (or may not be, or may merely resemble) our old favourite Elisabeth (Sissi) of Austria. Guten Appetit.