Following our glimpse of Böcklin’s inspiration off the coast of Corfu, a short jaunt inland brings us to former haunts of two of our favourite headstrong dames.

Achilleion

Empress Elisabeth of Austria (a.k.a. Sissi) never pursued a building programme quite as extensive and profligate as that of her cousin and kindred spirit Ludwig II. However, soon after the Bavarian king’s death in 1886, she set about constructing a big-budget get-away of her own. This was the palace of Achilleion, an expression of her love for Greece and one of its classical heroes in particular. “He was strong and bold,” said Sissi of Achilles, “he despised all kings and all traditions; he worshipped nothing but his own will, and he loved nothing but his dreams.” Like Sissi, Achilles would not be readily brought to heel. The palace that takes his name sits amid a spectacular, landscaped plot strewn with sculptures (including a nude study of Napoleon’s sister, Pauline Borghese), offering views northward to Corfu Town and beyond to the mountains of Albania.

Greece and Sissi’s native Bavaria enjoyed intimate relations throughout the 19th century. Her uncle Ludwig I was an ardent philhellene, and the neo-classical facades of today’s Munich originated in his reign. The first Oktoberfest, in contrast to the Lagerpalooza it has become, was actually an attempt at recreating the Olympic Games – then in their millennium-and-a-half abeyance – to mark Ludwig’s wedding. Conversely one of the best-selling lagers in Greece to this day bears the surname of Bavarian brewer Johann Karl Fix, who introduced beer to the country after Ludwig’s son Otto ruled united Greece as its first modern king between 1832 and 1862.

Sissi first visited Corfu as a young woman, when the island was still a British protectorate, and fell in love with it. By the time she returned in the late 1880s to launch the grand project of the Achilleion, she had all but retired from public life, devastated by the suicide of her son, Crown Prince Rudolf.

Considering it was merely a holiday home with no official function, the Achilleion is quite the pile. The erstwhile chatelaine stands on a pedestal to the left of the entrance, looking down on our uncrowned heads as we pollute her serene retreat with our plebeian presence. No matter how you position yourself, even jumping up on the window sill (yes, I tried), you can never get eye-to-eye with her marble effigy. In terms of decor, the bright, cool reception rooms explore different modes of “classical” design, alternating between restraint and excess (from the ornamental incontinence of the staircase the Partner surmised that the empress had been presented with a book of possible decorative motifs and simply responded “yes”).

Once construction was completed in 1892, Elisabeth arrived on the imperial yacht named for another Habsburg home, Miramare. In his 1899 biography, A. de Burgh describes the obsessive solitude of Sissi’s time in Achilleion, where she failed to shake off the melancholy that distinguished her later life:

…her apartments there were completely isolated from any other part of the building; she had her private entrance, and could leave or enter the palace entirely unobserved at any moment during the day or night. Her meals she took by herself, waited upon only by a lady-in-waiting and one footman. She would spend a few hours during the day in the society of some of her suite, or with her teachers and readers; but the nights were her own – then she would wander alone through the dark groves and along the gloomy walks. When everyone had retired and night covered the landscape, in the subdued glimmer of the moon or the stars, the Empress was often seen entering the gardens, clad in dark, closely fitting garments, a black veil thrown over her head, as she glided along the terraces and the paths of the park, and found her way to the beautiful monument she had erected to her son Rudolf in one of the most enchanting spots of her domain.

She soon tired of her hideaway, her enthusiasm so consumed by the journey that none remained for the destination. “Making a palace of dreams is not the same as living in a palace which is made,” as later biographer Andrew Sinclair notes. Sissi left a poem in which she appeared to regret spoiling the peace of the little villa that stood on the site before she had it removed for her “fairy palace” as she puts it. The verse has an old cat returning to the site only to leave again, dispirited by the change. Sissi herself only visited the Achilleion for around two weeks a year until her death in 1898.

Almost a decade later it was purchased by Wilhelm II – the interior still boasts his desk chair, fashioned as a saddle. The anti-Semitic kaiser removed the memorial to Jewish poet Heinrich Heine that Sissi had erected in the grounds. He kept Sissi’s statue of the dying Achilles, but his own response could not have better illustrated the contrast between the reclusive, morbid empress and the belligerent, vain German overlord; Wilhelm had an enormous figure of Achilles in full martial mode erected, which crudely dominates a garden terrace. After periods as a military hospital in the two world wars and later service as a casino, the palace was restored and now functions as a museum.

The writer offers his respects

Gastouri

Before we descend the winding roads to the coast, we retrace the sandaled footsteps of another strange yet familiar flower.

If Sissi carried the classicist sehnsucht of Munich back to its origin, writer Franziska zu Reventlow brought an entirely different mode with her from the Bavarian capital. Aristocrat by birth, “Fanny” zu Reventlow was governed by the free-spirited customs she had observed in the Munich district of Schwabing, where she became notorious as the “bohemian countess”. Like Sissi, she was drawn to this hillside for the liberty and solitude it promised. “I well understand why the gods sought out Greece and I’m beside myself with happiness to be here,” swooned Reventlow after landing on Corfu.

In late 1906, shortly before Kaiser Wilhelm turned up to measure the drapes in his newly purchased palace, Reventlow and her illegitimate son Rolf arrived in the little town of Gastouri, walking distance from the Achilleion. While it didn’t share its neighbour’s sea vista, the village enjoys sublime views across the green, cypress-studded hills of the hinterland as compensation. A turgid winter and recurring illness tested the resolve of mother and son, and their accommodation left much to be desired. Above them in their shabby guesthouse dwelt a Frenchman by the unlikely name of Monsieur Mouton, who had lent a sum of money to the landlord and, with repayment non-forthcoming, stubbornly remained to get his money’s worth. And while Reventlow sometimes complained of the isolation, company could be worse. On one occasion a “pack” of Germans swept her up and enjoined her to a copiously liquid breakfast on board a ship anchored in Corfu Town. These figures evidently made an impression, turning up in barely transfigured form ten years later in the last collection of fiction she published in her lifetime, The Guesthouse at the Sign of the Teetering Globe (1917).

Although I don’t know exactly where she lived for the few months of her Gastouri episode in 1906/07 (or even if the building still stands), the village offers a few crumbling candidates. With no evidence beyond intuition I found a building near a little church that I felt best embodied her presence. Two cats eyed me suspiciously from its external staircase, while a group of calla lilies cowered in the shade before its decaying shutters. One solitary lily kept its distance from the rest, glowing with an uncanny light when photographed. A lost portrait of arch individualist Reventlow showed her holding lilies, and I concluded that this lone bloom would stand for the bohemian countess.

Before too much of the new year elapses, I wanted to share news of some titles appearing in the rest of 2018 that stray into Strange Flowers’ beat of wayward cultural history. Hopefully you can find something in this lot to look forward to.

Let’s start with a book that I know a few people reading this will be excited about. Of Kings and Things is an anthology of works by Count Eric Stenbock collated by David Tibet, who stopped by to discuss his obsession with the Estonian-born Decadent writer a couple of years ago. Mild caveat: this is not the mooted complete works, rather an introduction to the writings of the fabulously morbid Stenbock. Get in quick for the limited edition hardcover signed by Tibet plus a Stenbock-themed tote bag, from Strange Attractor (MIT Press in the US). Our namesake delves further into the Gay Nineties with Incurable, a collection from Lionel Johnson who – like Stenbock – converted to Catholicism, drank to excess and died young.

Our third selection from an impressive Strange Attractor/MIT 2018 line-up records the words of a London identity who is perhaps even more obscure, yet closer to us in time. A while back I picked up a rare copy of What Rough Beast?, published in 1939. This highly unusual and innovative experiment in life writing, described by its author Mark Benney as “an anatomy of stupidity”, took as its subject a self-mythologising eccentric who had walk-on (or hobble-on) parts in numerous memoirs of London’s demi-monde around the mid-20th century, Ironfoot Jack. Sydney-born hobohemian Jack Neave, appropriately enough a man of all trades (including a foray into gastronomy so brief it may actually have been fictional) is soon to be seen in the film version of Colin Wilson’s Adrift in Soho. And released around the same time is The Surrender of Silence, a recently rediscovered autobiographical account of the man himself.

Fun fact #1: boxer-poet Arthur Cravan (as he never let anyone forget) was the nephew of Oscar Wilde. The European ideal is very much alive in Maintenant?, a bilingual English-French edition issued by Italian publisher Silvana Editoriale to accompany an exhibition in Spain about the Swiss-born Cravan. This, we are told, is “the most substantial book on Cravan in English yet published”. The spirit of his famous uncle hovered as an éminence rose well into the 20th century with which he was barely acquainted, invoked in the culture war that blazed while Britain was still fighting the last stages of the very real World War One. It pitted the John Bullish caricature, MP Noel Pemberton Billing, against a morally suspect creative class represented by the dancer Maud Allan, famous for her risqué adaptation of Wilde’s Salomé. You may recall Philip Hoare’s treatment of these events in Wilde’s Last Stand (1997); now Wendy Buonaventura revisits this contested territory in Dark Venus (Amberley).

Fun fact #2: Wilde was assisted in writing Salomé in the original French by Marcel Schwob. Imaginary Lives (originally published in 1896) is one of two books by Schwob newly translated by Chris Clarke and soon to appear through Wakefield Press. This sounds very us:

These twenty-two portraits present figures drawn from the margins of history, from Empedocles the “Supposed God” and Clodia the “Licentious Matron” to the pirate Captain Kidd and the Scottish murderers Messrs. Burke and Hare. In his quest for unique existences, Schwob also formulated an early conception of the anti-hero, and discarded historical figures in favor of their shadows, be they divine, mediocre, or criminal.

Fun fact #3: Marcel Schwob was the uncle of Lucy Schwob, (slightly) better known as Claude Cahun, one of the most radical and original forces in 20th century (self-)portrait photography. She, and her lover/partner/step-sister Marcel Moore are the subjects of Rupert Thomson’s forthcoming novel through Other Press, Never Anyone But You (the pair also turned up in last year’s non-fiction study The Militant Muse, which examined alliances between women in and around the Surrealist movement, romantic and otherwise). Late Surrealist Desmond Morris (as in late to the movement; the painter and Naked Ape author is happily still with us) reveals more about how persona informs creativity in the forthcoming The Lives of the Surrealists (Thames & Hudson).

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz: Portrait of Maria Nawrocka (1910)

The career of Polish artist and writer Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (a.k.a. Witkacy) coincided with the rise and apogee of Surrealism, and although not officially aligned with the movement, he did admit elements of its absurd dream logic into his art and even more so into his writing. Twisted Spoon will soon release his admirably frank 1932 prose work Narcotics (here translated by Soren Gauger) – they had me at “Meandering, acerbic, and burlesque“. It also includes portraits created by Witkiewicz under the influence of meticulously documented stimulants.

In Diary of a Drug Fiend, Aleister Crowley fictionalised his own response to and dependence on different substances. Its publication followed his World War One-era New World adventure now captured in Tobias Churton’s substantial new book, Aleister Crowley in America (Inner Traditions). I look forward to reading more about Crowley’s impulsive gesture of prematurely proclaiming the Irish Republic in 1915 at the foot of the Statue of Liberty to a fiddle accompaniment by Leila Waddell (first he took Manhattan, then he took Berlin). But with Crowley’s own works entering the public domain this year, expect to see a flood of cheap reissues with multiple offenses against typography. The Great Beast is joined in the post-copyright wildlands this year by fellow Golden Dawn adherent Arthur Machen, although happily one of the first Machen reissues this year is a highly respectful compendium. It comes from Centipede Press, who normally specialise in pricy collectables with lavish production values. But their new edition is a refreshingly economical, generously proportioned introduction to Machen’s strange fictional universe.

Alastair, c. 1910

I wouldn’t ordinarily flag foreign-language publications, but this is too good not to mention: the first biography of Alastair, the German polymath whose transcendent artistry and fanatically curated selfhood launched Strange Flowers back in – Jesus H. Crisp, have I really been doing this that long? Yet another of the post-1890s generation transfixed by Wilde and in particular Salomé, Alastair illustrated a 1925 French edition of the work. The artist, dancer and poet was still around in the early 1960s when author Manfred Zieger met him, and the two continued to correspond until the maestro’s death in 1969. I find it difficult to explain how very, very excited I am about this book. Possibly it is something that, like Alastair’s own most compelling appearances, could only be expressed through the medium of the dance. I will report back with some key findings once I’ve calmed down and had a chance to absorb it.

Another thing you’ll rarely see in these round-ups is a big-ticket academic title, but here’s one I couldn’t resist. Out mid-year for a mere one hundred and ten of your British pounds, Sissi‘s World (Bloomsbury Academic) examines ‘The Empress Elisabeth in Myth and Memory’, and appropriately enough it is not the flesh and blood (and hair) consort on the cover, but representations of her in cinema and art. Chapters include “Sissi, the Chinese Princess: A Timely and Versatile Post-Mao Icon” and “The Remains of the Stay: The Corporeal Archive of Empress Elisabeth in the Hofburg”.

Sissi’s Vienna overlapped with but was entirely distinct from Gustav Klimt‘s. Next month marks the centenary of Klimt’s passing and while the works of the Austrian artist are unfamiliar to exactly no-one, it is his highly idiosyncratic life – including his complicated relationships with the fascinating Flöge sisters – that is celebrated in Patrick Bade’s Gustav Klimt at Home. Another woman who lingered in his shadow – and not just his – is remembered in a forthcoming book by Sasho Dimoski (translated from the original Macedonian by Paul Filev). Alma Mahler is a fictionalised account of the woman (unhappily) married to composer Gustav Mahler. With later marriages to Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel, affairs with Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, her personal connections to many of Vienna’s early Modernists completely overshadowed her own creative output in writing and composition. Here Dimoski gamely imagines Alma Mahler’s life (much like Zurab Karumidze conceived the life of Norwegian writer Dagny Juel, ill-fated wife of the sulphurous Stanisław Przybyszewki, in 2011’s Dagny, or a Love Feast, also through Dalkey Archive).

All of this speaks to my inexhaustible fascination for the fictionalisation of real figures. Marcel Proust alone conscripted a small army of personalities and measured them up for the dress uniform of artifice – Princess Violette Murat and Comte Robert de Montesquiou to name but two who have featured in these pages. Caroline Weber’s Proust’s Duchess (Penguin Random House) examines three women of late 19th century French society who compositely informed Proust’s characterisation of the Duchesse de Guermantes.

Lesley Blanch sold her most famous book as history, although on excavating the past she wasn’t above plastering holes in the narrative with the Polyfilla of conjecture to achieve a smooth facade (I’d stand back if I were you – this metaphor could collapse at any moment). In The Wilder Shores of Love (1954) she examined the lives of a quartet of Western European women – including Jane Digby and Isabelle Eberhardt – who sought liberation from social constraints in the Middle East. In Journey into the Mind’s Eye (NYRB Classics), on the other hand, she turns to another adventurer – herself. I look forward to these ‘fragments of an autobiography’ from the writer and historian who died in 2007, and if necessary revising my judgment of her as “arguably the last of the unreconstructed Orientalists“.

We close with a book that brings us dangerously close to the present day, the wonderfully titled House of Nutter (Crown Archetype/Chatto & Windus). I talked to author Lance Richardson a year and a half ago about his forthcoming debut, which looks at the Nutter brothers, Tommy and David, who made their mark in tailoring and photography respectively. This is “the stunning true story of two gay men who influenced some of the most iconic styles and pop images of the twentieth century […] a dual portrait of brothers improvising their way through five decades of extraordinary events, their personal struggles playing out against vivid backdrops of the Blitz, an obscenity trial, the birth of disco, and the devastation of the AIDS crisis.”

Happy 2018!

We’re in Vienna! Well, just outside. We’ll be back soon for a more expansive look at the Austrian capital and its rich heritage of neurosis and peculiarity, but for now Partner and self find ourselves at the western edge of the city where the streets slope abruptly upward then just as suddenly halt at the onset of the Vienna Woods. We are tracing the tale of Sissi.

What has always fascinated me about Sissi – more correctly Sisi, more formally Empress Elisabeth of Austria – is the jarring disconnect between her extremely idiosyncratic character (reclusive, morbid compulsive who had a horse called ‘Nihilst’, starved herself and lived much of her adult life longing for death) and her banal postumous image (pretty lady in a big frock). It is the latter variant that appears in effigy all over Vienna, and it is in pursuit of this sanitised phantom that the crowds queue to see her apartments in the city-centre Hofburg. I could have picked this or any number of other Viennese locations associated with the empress, but in the Hermesvilla we have an early insight into the private, tragic, flat-out weird Sissi that is infinitely more compelling.

The tragedy, it is important to point out, was real. It is difficult to imagine a more appalling fate than losing a child to suicide, but as well as this Sissi endured the death of another child in infancy and the early loss of two sisters, and the mysterious demise of her beloved cousin Ludwig. Wrenched from her idyllic Bavarian childhood and brought to Vienna on marrying Emperor Franz Joseph at just 16, her children taken away from her as soon as they were born, she grew to hate the court and put as much distance between it and herself as possible. The Hermesvilla, lying in sylvan solitude amid a former Habsburg hunting ground just outside Vienna, was a gift from Franz Joseph to Sissi, but also an attempt to lure her home. The imperial pair first stayed in the villa in 1887, thereafter Sissi generally spent the late spring of each year here.

Please enjoy the panoramic view of Vienna

Once you arrive at the extensive grounds of the Lainzer Tiergarten, as it is now known, you still have a way to go (so far from public transport! It’s like they weren’t even thinking about the resale value). We detour via a promised hill-top view over Vienna but today it is veiled in autumn mists. They have drifted away by the time we approach the villa, and there is something magical about the way it slowly becomes visible throught the trees.

Like Sissi’s later Corfiot bolthole Achilleion, it’s a substantial residence that still adheres to a recognisably human scale. But it’s an oddly disparate structure; the side facing the U-shaped courtyard presents a stern Mitteleuropa countenance, while the garden facade is adorned with filigree wrought-iron lace; in parts it could almost be an overblown colonial-era Australian house, until the dominant gene reasserts itself, in the form of an out-sized protuberance jutting from one side like the jaw of one of Franz Joseph’s Habsburg forebears.

Inside the interiors reflect a range of late 19th-century design ideals. Some spaces, such as the elegant main staircase, are relatively restrained, although it is never entirely clear how much they reflect original circumstances. A range of historicist approaches distinguish other parts of the house, most cohesively in Sissi’s private gym with its Pompeiian-style murals, most regrettably in some maladroit ceiling paintings.

I mean, it’s not exactly Tiepolo, is it?

Sissi’s bed chamber, meanwhile, is an overwrought, nightmare-ish melange of competing motifs and materials, Mannerist in its unsettling disproportion. Murals speak of the empress’s identification with Shakespeare’s Titania while the bed, with its funereal baldachin, isn’t even the creepiest thing in the room. That would be the shrouded figure in the corner, which Sissi commissioned to mark the death of her son. Imagine brushing up against that as you get up to pee in the middle of the night; ill met by moonlight indeed.

More morbid mementoes await; Sissi’s cousin Ludwig appears in a formal portrait, but also in a pastel of the dead king laid out in state. Even by the standards of an era that offered us mourning jewellery and photographic portraits of mothers who had died in childbirth, the scent of mortal doom hangs heavy in what is supposed to be a leafy getaway.

But the garden outside is still full of life so we exit via the gift shop, leaving with a rubber ducky Sissi and a copy of Michaela Lindinger’s book Sonderlinge, Außenseiter, Femmes Fatales: Das “Andere” Wien 1900 (“Eccentrics, Outsiders, Femmes Fatales: The “Other” Vienna around 1900″), a book that is so intensely me I can’t believe I haven’t come across it before. It also offers some valuable pointers to our Viennese digressions to come. For now, we set off in search of Sturm, the fresh, sweet, barely fermented harvest wine they serve in autumn here. After a visit to the faux toile gents’ we pass by Ulrike Truger’s contemporary statue showing Sissi the peek-a-boo solipsist with a fan in front of her face and head for a Heurigen.

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
Circles: Ludwig II/Sissi
Places: Sissi and Fanny’s Corfu

Part one here.

Cultural history aside, Vienna is most likely to enter your consciousness these days when it tops yet another quality-of-living survey. And while yes, those lists seem to be oriented exclusively to the concerns of boring, entitled yet anxious white ex-pats, even as a visitor you sense that the Austrian capital has its priorities well aligned. Leaving the old town you find just as many bicycles and trams along the Ringstrasse as cars. Even after Berlin the bike paths and public transport system across the city are impressive, development is retained at a human scale, forested hills are within easy reach and there is so much on offer by way of culture it’s ba-na-nas.

The Musikverein concert hall from the top of the Karlskirche

At the Musikverein, for example. You know the Musikverein. Even if you’ve never been there you probably recognise it from hungover viewings of the concert of crowd-pleasing classics they hold here every New Year’s Day. It is home to the Vienna Phil, high temple of the Mitteleuropa symphonic tradition. And it is a tradition that is jealously guarded and resistant to renewal, as an incident in March 1913 showed. Arnold Schönberg (later Schoenberg) was conducting a new work by Anton Webern, a setting of “postcard texts” written by – yes, it’s our unshakable tour mascot, Peter Altenberg. The orchestra struck up the first, unsettling chord of a piece entitled “Beyond the Limits of the Universe”; it was certainly beyond the limits of the audience, who completely lost their Scheisse and mounted an actual riot. Incensed concertgoers suggested that both composer and conductor should avail themselves of the facilities at Steinhof, Vienna’s best-known mental hospital; had they taken up this helpful counsel they might have encountered Altenberg himself, who was suffering one of his period episodes of instability. And as we leave there is a further reminder; we see the stately Karlskirche, where Altenberg, born Jewish, was baptised in 1910. It is presently filled with an installation by artist Tomás Saraceno, in which a huge reflective sphere makes the church look like an illusion in a Renaissance painting.

Peter Altenberg

The nearby Konzerthaus first opened for business later in 1913, with a concert attended by Emperor Franz Joseph. The programming had certainly loosened up by 1922, when Weimar Berlin’s most notorious performer Anita Berber turned up with her dance partner-in-crime Sebastian Droste for the first evening of their “Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy”. This was actually – to use a crass contemporary term – a multi-platform project. It was a stage performance, a film (tragically lost), a book of text and images. Not to mention a lifestyle. The partnership of Berber and Droste was of the utmost combustibility, compelling on stage but utterly dysfunctional in the unforgiving light of day. Droste stole to fund his drug consumption; Berber openly shot up in cafes and was quick to violence. The pair’s tumultuous Vienna residency marked not only a peak but also a close to their chaotic co-dependency. Both were charged with stealing and expelled from Austria (Berber confronted the police naked when they turned up to her hotel room). Back in Berlin Droste helped himself to Berber’s jewels and fled to the US and Hell’s own Fred and Ginger never saw each other again. Neither of them made it out of the ’20s alive.

A double-exposure portrait of Archduke Ludwig Viktor

Archduke Ludwig Viktor, as we saw, was banished from Vienna after his sweaty disgrace in the nearby Centralbad. In a more formal context he could be found in his Renaissance-style palace which was built in a new-money part of town that was developed around the time that his brother Franz Joseph ordered the construction of the Ringstrasse to create more opportunities for architectural exhibitionism. But the remarkable thing about Ludwig Viktor is that his queerness wasn’t at all confined to covert fumbles in the steam baths; his public persona was scarcely butch either. He spent huge sums on antiques and appeared in theatrical productions, sometimes in drag. He held lavish balls in his residence which gave him valuable opportunities to gather and disseminate gossip about the court and the moneyed bourgeoisie that partied in their wake (the building now hosts a TGI Friday’s. FFS.). Empress Sissi, initially favourably disposed to her brother-in-law, was turned off by his duplicity and committed her uncharitable thoughts to verse.

Sissi’s cosmic destiny as consort of tragedy was sealed around 1888 when her son Rudolf, the Crown Prince, met an attractive young woman by the name of Mary Vetsera. We cross now to nearby Salesianergasse, to a site that once hosted a palace which in 1880 became home to the Vetsera family. The Vetseras – newly ennobled, cashed-up and ravenously ambitious – were eager to pair their daughter Mary off with a high-placed scion. And Rudolf was as high-placed a scion as they came. But there was the small matter that he was already married. And he already had a lover, an actress to whom the troubled prince had proposed a suicide pact. Finding this generous invitation rebuffed yet still wishing to up the body count of his self-authored exit and noticing Mary’s star-struck devotion, he enrolled her in his plan (imagine being someone’s second pick for a suicide pact …). The two died in 1889 in not-entirely clarified circumstances at a Habsburg hunting lodge, the infamous “Mayerling” incident. Sissi was still dressing in black almost a decade later when she fell to an anarchist’s dagger. In 1991 poor Mary’s tomb was raided by a furniture salesman convinced that he could solve the enigma of her death.

On balance, probably not the outcome that Ma and Pa Vetsera had in mind.

Hermann Bahr

Still on Salesianergasse, we pass a handsome, four-storey yellow building. So, you remember Stefan George cruising Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the Café Griensteidl in part one? HvH was still living here with his parents when all that was going on, in fact this is the house in which he was born. This august association lasted until 1892 and is marked with a plaque and flags; less celebrated is the fact that Hermann Bahr moved into the building in 1894. This is of particular interest to me because Bahr was living here when his book Antisemitism – my last major translation project – was published. As that book showed, Bahr was intensely well-connected; not only was he the prime mover in the café-dwelling movement of progressive writers and artists known as “Young Vienna” (Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Stefan Zweig, Felix Salten … Peter Altenberg), he met and corresponded with their equivalents across the continent – reflecting his belief in a “United States of Europe” – and was a highly perceptive forecaster of cultural movements and nurturer of new talent.

Emilie Flöge

Taking a route that Bahr himself most certainly took more than once in his time, we transport ourselves to a corner building with an elaborate turret at the bottom of Mariahlifer Strasse, the (now largely pedestrianised) main shopping street of central Vienna. Bahr would have been heading to the café on the ground floor of the building, but before we join him we are going to briefly sneak upstairs and visit the Flöge sisters.

Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt

You may not know the name Emilie Flöge, but you will almost certainly recognise her face from some of the most famous artworks of the era, painted by Gustav Klimt. The exact nature of the pair’s relationship is uncertain (on balance they were probably lovers), and Emilie may or may not be the model for the female figure in Klimt’s most beloved work, The Kiss (on balance she probably was). There is no doubt, however, that Emilie was far more than just a muse supplying mute, decorative inspiration to a male artist; she was a vital, radical creative force in her own right. We find her in the upstairs salon apparently designed by Secession and Wiener Werkstätte architect Josef Hoffmann (although the plaque outside claims that it was designed by Klimt and Kolo Moser, Hoffmann’s creative partner in the Wiener Werkstätte). Emilie ran a fashion company here with sisters Pauline and Helene (the widow of Gustav Klimt’s brother Ernst), jettisoning the corset entirely and expanding on Reform Dress concepts to arrive at a completely new form of clothing. And in an era when vanishingly few women ran their own businesses, they represented a new era of creative entrepreneurship. Emilie Flöge was an avid collaborator, with Klimt contributing to the geometric patterns of her flowing, liberating, caftan-like pieces, variations of which he then included in his own canvasses. There was also extensive cross-over between the Flöges’ clientele and Klimt’s wealthy portrait subjects, such as Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Back downstairs we find Bahr again in a familiar environment – a café. This is the Café Casa Piccola, now gone but once one of the grandest of the institutions that are so central to our understanding of fin-de-siècle Viennese literary communities as to constitute a cliché. But from a present-day perspective, it is also remarkable the extent to which cafés, busy conduits for knowledge and sentiment, resembled later digitally connected systems. The larger establishments offered not just a huge selection of newspapers, domestic and foreign, but also reference material – maps, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, language lexicons, address books – for writers struggling with their research, or merely trying to settle an argument. The combination of hard facts and caffeinated opinion firing through the steamy analogue ether constituted a local area network of extraordinary reach. In the pre-digital era, the Viennese café offered the greatest possible concentration of current knowledge – for the price of a mélange.

Lina Loos

Do I even need to mention that Peter Altenberg is here? It is partly the presence of the owners’ daughter Lina that attracts him. At 19 she married the renowned architect Adolf Loos, 12 years her senior. It wasn’t a happy marriage, and Lina took up with a younger man (as in younger than her; he was still in school). This was Heinz Lang, son of a feminist theosophist. Adolf confronted Lina about the affair but she had already tired of the earnest young man and wrote him a farewell letter; as Hugo von Hofmannsthal tells it, a despairing Heinz turned to (this is getting ridiculous) Peter Altenberg and asked his advice. Peter Altenberg flippantly suggested he kill himself and the young man, his time on earth too brief to have equipped him with a sense of irony and waiting in vain for Lina to join him in England, did just that. A year later the Looses divorced and Lina went on to become a writer and acclaimed stage actor (that was her launching the Fledermaus back in part one); a 2017 Austrian film tells the whole story.

Georg Trakl

Fast forward. In August of the fabled year of 1913, we find her now remarried ex-husband Adolf Loos on a Venetian holiday in curious company. It’s moody, maudit poet Georg Trakl, who has just published the only volume of verse he would issue in his lifetime. Now the Marquis de Sad is in La Serenissima with the Looses, Karl Kraus and – yes, Peter Altenberg. Trakl is trying and – if the photo of him on the Lido scowling in a black swimming costume is any indication – failing to have a good time. Back in Vienna, we find him on our next stop, an apartment overlooking a narrow street which was the young poet’s residence when he enjoyed the impressive title of Landwehrmedikamentenakzessist – army pill-pusher, more or less. Not a few of those pills he pushed in his own direction. Not that it improved his opinion of the capital, or its inhabitants. “I don’t like the Viennese at all. As people they conceal a bunch of dumb, stupid, mean qualities behind a distasteful bonhomie. There is nothing more disgusting to me than a forced emphasis on conviviality.”

Trakl was one of a number of struggling artists and writers to benefit from the generosity of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was born into one of Vienna’s wealthiest families. In the early stages of World War One Trakl served as a field doctor and suffered a breakdown when confronted by the horror of modern warfare; Wittgenstein set out to save him but Trakl had OD’d on coke by the time he got there. Meanwhile, on a quiet street we find one of the more unusual products of the philosophical mind – the house that Wittgenstein designed for his sister. He drew up the first designs (with architect Paul Engelmann, a student of Adolf Loos) in 1926. After the frothy confections of much of central Vienna (and I am not saying that like it’s a bad thing), the stringent lines and utter absence of ornament in Haus Wittgenstein are like a glass of bracingly iced water. With the same rigour he brought to the Tractatus and other philosophical works, Wittgenstein had everything down to the door knobs made to his exacting specifications. The inhabitants never truly warmed to the house, and it was almost demolished in the 1970s, but now serves as a cultural centre for the Bulgarian Embassy.

A long-running story places a precocious 14-year-old Ludwig Wittgenstein at the funeral of the man who died at our next stop, Otto Weininger. Certainly the adult Wittgenstein expressed his admiration for Weininger, a man so fiercely antisemitic that he was later approvingly, if selectively quoted by the Nazis; never mind that Weininger himself (like Wittgenstein) was Jewish. He was also one of the more aggressively misogynistic of modern philosophers, his nihilism informed by a depression that rarely lifted in his brief life; Stefan Zweig remembers him as “looking like he’d got off a 30-hour train journey, dirty, tired, wrinkled…”. Weininger’s reputation rests on the book Sex and Character, published in 1903. A few months after its disappointing release he was apparently brought to the precipice of despair upon reading a book by the Polish-German author Stanisław Przybyszewski entitled Totenmesse (Requiem), which begins with the words “In the beginning there was sex…”. This, in any case, is the account of (seriously?) Peter Altenberg. Whatever the immediate cause, in October 1903, Weininger took himself to the house in which his hero Beethoven had died in 1827, and shot himself in the heart. The building was demolished shortly after, because apparently the fact that Ludwig van actual Beethoven had died there wasn’t of sufficient moment to save it. Weininger’s demise at least boosted sales of his book.

We find Stefan Zweig again as a subject for photographer Trude Fleischmann, who opened her studio near the imposing Rathaus 100 years ago (should I mention that the Rathaus contains another full-sized statue of Peter Altenberg to match the one we saw back in Café Central? No? OK). By that time Fleischmann had served an apprenticeship under Madame d’Ora (Dora Kallmus) and already met and photographed – would you believe? – Peter Altenberg. It was 1918; she was just starting her career, Altenberg was at the end of his life. “Be yourself, no more and no less,” he told her, “but be whole.” Three months later he was dead. Like Kallmus, who had left in 1927, Fleischmann was Jewish and left in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Germany. Like Zweig she headed for the Americas, setting up in New York where she re-established herself as a portraitist of the creative class, with subjects including her compatriot Alma Mahler – most memorably laid out in her coffin after her death in 1964.

In her more animated years, Alma Mahler occupied a house built in 1911 by Josef Hoffmann (who designed the Flöge sisters’ salon) in reinforced concrete, the stock-in-trade of its first owner, Eduard Ast. Villa Ast, or Haus Ast, was intended to form part of an artists’ colony that never came to be. In 1931, when Alma moved in, she was Mrs Franz Werfel, wife of the Austrian writer who was the last of numerous prominent male cultural figures with whom she was associated starting with the man who shared her first kiss – Gustav Klimt. Alma was a highly complex individual; she was extremely strong-willed, yet she set aside her own promising career as a lieder composer when she married Gustav Mahler. With the exception of Walter Gropius, the men in her life were generally Jewish, yet with a few drinks in her she could be as antisemitic as Otto Weininger. She inspired strong emotions, charmed and alienated in equal measure. She was the addressee of the greatest musical love letter of the age (the Adagietto of Gustav Mahler’s 5th Symphony) and the creepiest tribute imaginable (the life-sized doll that Oskar Kokoschka commissioned in her “likeness”). Meanwhile the house, which was a centre for Vienna’s interwar cultural life until she went into exile in 1938, is now empty, owned by the Saudi government and in an alarming state of dilapidation.

Villa Ast sits atop a hill at the bottom of which you find the most prestigious of Vienna’s early 20th-century social housing developments that it the title of “Red Vienna” – Karl-Marx-Hof. It’s an extraordinarily long building; going past it on the tram you have the same surreal sensation you get cycling around the former Berlin Tempelhof airport terminal for actual minutes on end – “how can I possibly still be going past the same building?”

We are off to another Hof, our last destination. It is the court of heaven, or Himmelhof. The hillside site at the exact point where Vienna gives way to the Vienna Woods is now a boarding school but this is where we would once have found one of the most idiosyncratic and controversial of fin-de-siècle visions: artist Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, who – like Stefan George, like Anita Berber – came from Germany trailing scandal. Casting himself out of society, a pacifist, vegetarian and self-proclaimed prophet stalking the cobbles of 1880s Munich in a long beard, tunic and sandals and warning of the finitude of natural resources, he is justifiably regarded as the first hippie. His artistic achievements were almost secondary to the revolutionary social change he represented, but it was in Vienna in 1892 that he had his breakthrough exhibition. Crowds flocked to the long-running show of Diefenbach’s quasi-Symbolist canvases, the recurring subjects being ‘Christ and Diefenbach’ as one critic said; the resemblance between the two did not go unnoticed. But his success was short-lived; Diefenbach had been cheated out of his earnings by the exhibitors.

Diefenbach was back in Vienna in 1894, moving into a villa in the Hütteldorf district where he penned a bitter 600-page account of his career to that point, quoting more or less everything ever written about himself, concentrating on the catastrophe of his first Viennese exhibition. As with his paintings, to which uncredited collaborators like František Kupka contributed, Diefenbach delegated much of the work. He returned to Vienna for the last time in 1897, and in the outlying district of Ober St. Veit established the Himmelhof, one of the very first communes. Gusto Gräser was here for a while, but he was repelled by Diefenbach, who insisted on being addressed as “Homo” (to emphasise his humanity; Diefenbach was prodigiously heterosexual). The tyrannical master controlled incoming and outgoing mail, ordered children to be raised communally, demanded celibacy (for others), ensured mandatory attendance for his readings from Nietzsche. In 1899 the whole exercise descended into chaos and Diefenbach turned his back on mainland Europe, seeing in the new century on Capri where he ended his days in 1913.

We descend from the court of Heaven and look out over the valley. Our time is done, and we appear to have shaken off our constant companion at last. Or have we? For away in the distance we see the magnificent hilltop Kirche am Steinhof, the church designed by Otto Wagner which served the inmates of the Steinhof institution. Who included … Peter Altenberg.

We open with the eagerly awaited biography of Joseph Roth, Keiron Pim’s Endless Flight, which I picked up last month in Winchester (where I also managed to walk straight past Jane Austen’s grave in the magnificent cathedral; too busy looking up). Thanks to extensive coverage it seems the great Austrian author is finally gaining the status in the English-speaking book world he deserves. Roth is among my very favourite authors and one I usually reserve for the colder months, so I am looking forward to finally reading this over the holidays. And if you’re new to Joseph Roth yet curious we have a brace of newly reissued translations, including the devastating Job (translated by Dorothy Thompson, all others here translated by Michael Hofmann), The Legend of the Holy Drinker, the reportage of What I Saw and The Hotel Years, The Radetzky March – often cited as his masterpiece – and its follow-up The Emperor’s Tomb. If pressed this might well be my pick of the Roths; I actually forgot to breathe the first time I read the piano scene, while the conclusion is an electrifying collaboration between Roth the novelist and Roth the reporter, incorporating the annexation of Austria in real time.

Roth’s first book was the extraordinarily prescient The Spider’s Web (1923), most likely the first novel to mention Hitler. That same year brought a tale that drew on the same anxieties, but which is now best remembered as a children’s film. Two new English editions of Austrian author Felix Salten’s Bambi (translated by Jack Zipes and Damion Searls respectively) show us the even darker themes behind a tale that has already traumatised millions of children. It can be read as both an allegory of antisemitism, “or a critique of humankind’s assault on nature,” as Maddie Crum writes, adding: “But why not both?”. Salten was both Jewish and a hunter, by the way. A fellow member of the early 20th-century Viennese avant-garde, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is the subject of Walter Kappacher’s novel Palace of Flies (translated by Georg Bauer). No longer the precocious twink of Austrian letters, the middle-aged Hofmannsthal is holed up in a provincial hotel “plagued by feelings of loneliness and failure that echo in a buzz of inner monologues, imaginary conversations and nostalgic memories of relationships with glittering cultural figures”. This tension also haunts the stories of Johannes Urzidil collected in House of the Nine Devils (translated by David Burnett) in which “… the writing often blurs the border between reportage, memoir, and fiction, such as an encounter with Gavrilo Princip, wasting away in the Terezín prison after his assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, or a WWI soldier trying to evade military police and thus disrupting a night at Café Arco, a favorite haunt of the Prague Circle that included Brod, Kafka, and Werfel, as well as Urzidil, the group’s youngest member and one of the last links to that symbiotic milieu of Prague German-Jewish artists.”

In the provocatively subtitled The Last Inward Man, Lesley Chamberlain finds in Prague-born Rainer Maria Rilke a writer who “sought to restore spirit to Western materialism, encouraging not narrow introversion but a heightened awareness of how to live with the world as it is, of how to retain a sense of transcendence within a world of collapsed spiritual certainty” (Chamberlain’s vital Nietzsche in Turin has also been reissued). Still on an Austro-Hungarian vibe, we have Opium and Other Stories (translated by Jascha Kessler and Charlotte Rogers) by Géza Csáth, “a Hungarian psychiatrist, one of Freud’s first followers, as well as a music critic and opium addict. In 1919, at the age of 31, he killed his wife and then committed suicide, just one year after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire.” We can’t move on without dropping in on the most fascinating figure of that construct’s demise – Sis(s)i, Empress Elisabeth – recent subject of two feature films plus a Netflix series. The latter also comes as a historical novel, The Empress by Gigi Griffis, which concentrates on Sissi’s first few months at the Viennese court. Fictional licence adds a pivotal lady-in-waiting, an attempted palace coup by the Emperor’s ill-fated brother Maximilian, and a degree of romance that the real imperial couple seem not to have shared. But it also captures the real Sissi’s rebellious spirit and her conflict with courtiers, particularly her mother-in-law. Later Sissi kept her distance from the court; Stefan Haderer falls Under the Spell of a Myth as he traces the steps of the Empress in Greece, including her Corfiot hidey hole named for Achilles.

Like Sissi, the Austrian women in Sophia Haydock’s debut The Flames – models in Egon Schiele’s canvases – are fixed as images. “None of these women is quite what they seem. Fierce, passionate and determined, they want to defy convention and forge their own path. But their lives are set on a collision course when they become entangled with the controversial young artist Egon Schiele whose work – and private life – are sending shockwaves through Vienna’s elite.” There are more muses unmuted in Ruth Millington’s Muse: Uncovering the Hidden Figures Behind Art History’s Masterpieces, tackling the myth of the “passive, powerless model (usually young, attractive, and female) at the mercy of an influential and older male artist”. The role of muse was one proffered to, and roundly rejected by German-born Surrealist Meret Oppenheim. Drawing from her extensive career, My Album “assembles photos, objects, notes, and brief texts, as well as ideas and concepts for artworks, and offers very personal insights into Oppenheim’s private life and thought.” Her most famous object – Object, a fur-lined cup, saucer and spoon – was displayed at the famous 1936 Surrealist exhibition in London, which brings us to The British Surrealists. Desmond Morris’s study takes us from “the unpredictability of Francis Bacon to the rebelliousness of Leonora Carrington, from the beguiling Eileen Agar to the ‘brilliant’ Ceri Richard” (meanwhile Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s English Garden Eccentrics offers sylvan Surrealism from uncommon gardeners whose creations were anything but common or garden). The evidently inexhaustible well of Surrealism has inspired two recent shows. At Potsdam’s Museum Barberini – which hit headlines recently after a climate activist thoughtfully shared their lunch with one of the gallery’s Monets – Surrealism and Magic revisits the movement’s representatives “who cultivated the traditional image of the artist’s persona as a magician, seer, and alchemist”. Meanwhile Surrealism Beyond Borders “traces Surrealism’s influence and legacy from the 1920s to the late 1970s in places as geographically diverse as Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Romania, Syria, Thailand, and Turkey”; this comes from the exhibition shown at the Tate in London and the Met in New York.

Who – might you guess – was the first woman to enjoy a solo retrospective at the Met? The somewhat surprising answer is the subject of Florine Stettheimer: A Biography by Barbara Bloemink. “During her first 40 years in Europe, Florine Stettheimer studied academic painting and was aware of all the earliest modernist styles ahead of most American artists. Returning to New York, she and her sisters led an acclaimed Salon for major avant-garde cultural figures including Marcel Duchamp, the Stieglitz circle, poets, dancers, writers, etc. She showed her innovative paintings in over 46 of the most important museum exhibitions and Salons, wrote poetry, designed unique furniture and gained international fame for her sets and costumes for avant-garde opera.” It was Duchamp, by the way, who organised that (posthumous) retrospective, and two new books explore the outset of Duchamp’s New York activities during World War One. Ruth Brandon’s Spellbound by Marcel explores the love triangle of Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, while Corinne Taunay’s Marcel Duchamp: Paris Air in New York (translated by Doug Skinner) describes the revolutionary art that emerged at the same time.

Two recent books cover the life and career of Jewish-Austrian artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who studied under cultish mystic Johannes Itten in Vienna before moving with him in 1919 to a new school in Germany called the Bauhaus, where among many other things she created a poster to celebrate Else Lasker-Schüler’s reading at the school. More of her images come to us in Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: Works from the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, while in Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: Bauhaus Student, Avant-Garde Painter, Art Teacher we discover a “painter, art teacher, and politically active poster artist. Initially, she specialized in textile and graphic design, and later she worked as an interior designer. Her paintings reflect her profound study of the classical avant-garde.” Deported to Theresienstadt, she taught art to hundreds of children; like most of her pupils, Dicker-Brandeis was murdered in the Holocaust. Not just a neglected artist overdue for rediscovery, but an example of the best of humanity in the very midst of Hell.

At a certain point a neglected artist becomes … an artist. In the case of Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint that point appears to have arrived. Following blockbuster exhibitions, numerous books (including a multi-volume catalogue raisonné), plus a feature film of her life, the narrative of non-figurative art has been corrected to incorporate her pioneering role. “Like many of the artists at the turn of the twentieth century who developed some version of abstract painting, af Klint studied Theosophy, which holds that science, art, and religion are all reflections of an underlying life-form that can be harnessed through meditation, study, and experimentation.” That’s from Hilma af Klint: A Biography by Julia Voss, who also wrote the afterword for Philipp Deines’s graphic novel, The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint. And the Pamela Colman Smith revival rolls on in another graphic treatment, Cat Willett’s The Queen of Wands. “From a childhood spent between the United Kingdom and Jamaica, to early artistic success in New York, to involvement in the secret occult society Order of the Golden Dawn … Though she received little money and almost no credit for her contributions to the magical realm in her lifetime, Pixie’s impact on tarot, divination, and the worlds of mysticism and the arts have reverberated for nearly 150 years, and her story serves as an enchanted spark.” Meanwhile, if you’re assembling your dinner-party-guests-from-history list, I can recommend Lisa Kröger & Melanie R. Anderson’s Toil & Trouble: A Women’s History of the Occult whose subjects range from “Dion Fortune, who tried to marshal a magical army against Hitler” to “Elvira, queer goth sex symbol who defied the Satanic Panic”.

Every time you mention the word “occult” a book about Aleister Crowley falls out of the sky. Don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules. Tumbling into our selection is the luridly titled Astounding Secrets of the Devil Worshippers’ Mystic Love Cult by William Seabrook, whom you may recall as the subject of wife Marjorie Worthington’s vexed biography. Here, in a series of early 1920s dispatches, Seabrook introduced American newspaper readers to the Great Beast’s orgiastic capers (that’s from Snuggly, of whom more later). Occult artist Austin Osman Spare had comparably earthly conjunctions in mind in his pan-sexual illustrations for Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, published for the first time in a lavish Fulgur production. NSFW, naturally, if that’s even a thing any more (isn’t it NSFH? Oh and while I have you here between parentheses, Phil Baker’s bio, the standard work on Spare, is due for an expanded reissue next year). A dirty book gathers no dust, and we recover some primo Weimar smut in the form of a Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights (translated by Michael Gillespie), whose “charming, witty, and erotic tales capture the trials and triumphs of early twentieth-century gay life without apology or shame”. It was originally issued in the early 1920s by author “Granand” (Erwin Ritter von Busse), and its fate offers a useful corrective to the myth that Weimar Germany was an anything-goes free-for-all; it was banned upon publication and only reissued decades later. True-life transgressions are the subject of Peter Jordaan’s impressively thorough A Secret between Gentlemen, “a unique historical biographical trilogy revealing the gay scandal, hidden for 120 years, that embroiled the noted British M.P., connoisseur, and philanthropist Cyril Flower, Lord Battersea in 1902.”

In After Sappho we have a personalised queer history, a “joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late 19th and early 20th century as they battle for control over their lives; for liberation and for justice.” Subjects include Natalie Barney (who needs no introduction to the readers of these pages), Virginia Woolf (who needs no introduction to anyone), along with many other lesbian or bisexual women of the 19th and 20th centuries. Author Selby Wynn Schwartz describes it as “a book about the desire to write your life for yourself, preferably in good company”. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) writes her own (early) life in HERmione, now reissued. “She was in her early twenties—a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place.” Donna Krolik Hollenberg, an authority on the subject, offers us Winged Words: The Life and Works of the Poet H.D., which “explores her love affairs with both men and women; her long friendship with Bryher; the birth of her daughter, Perdita, and her imaginative bond with her; and her marriage to (and later divorce from) fellow poet Richard Aldington. Additionally, the book includes scenes from her relationships with Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and D.H. Lawrence; H.D.’s fascination with spiritualism and the occult; and H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud.” It’s unclear why there has been such a run on H.D. of late, but if anyone’s keeping track we’re at the lengthy-New-Yorker-article stage of the revival. The women’s suffrage movement is the subject of Wendy L. Rouse’s Public Faces, Secret Lives, specifically the “variety of individuals who represented a range of genders and sexualities,” yet “publicly conformed to gendered views of ideal womanhood in order to make women’s suffrage more palatable to the public.” Another highly welcome historical study to counter the grievous fiction that trans identity is a Western invention of recent origin: Before We Were Trans, in which Kit Heyam seeks “to widen the scope of what we think of as trans history by telling the stories of people across the globe whose experience of gender has been transgressive, or not characterised by stability or binary categories.”

A more localised piece of queer history in Places of Tenderness and Heat, which spirits us to fin-de-siècle St. Petersburg, “a city full of risk and opportunity”. Author Olga Petri “takes us through busy shopping arcades, bathhouses, and public urinals to show how queer men routinely met and socialized.” One of the most influential products of Silver Age St. Petersburg was Sergei Diaghilev, the revolutionary cultural catalyst and creator of the Ballets Russes, and the subject of Rupert Christiansen’s Diaghilev’s Empire. “Off stage and in its wake came scandal and sensation, as the great artists and mercurial performers involved variously collaborated, clashed, competed while falling in and out of love with each other on a wild carousel of sexual intrigue and temperamental mayhem.” Diaghilev also features in Helen Rappaport’s After the Romanovs: “Talented intellectuals, artists, poets, philosophers, and writers eked out a living at menial jobs, while others found great success. Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Bunin, Chagall, and Stravinsky joined Picasso, Hemingway, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein in the creative crucible of the Années folles …” In a similar vein comes Homeward from Heaven by Boris Poplavsky who shares the not exactly congested category of “Paris-based boxer-poets who died in their early 30s” with our old sparring partner Arthur Cravan. Translated by Bryan Karetnyk, Poplavsky’s novel was “… written just before his life was cut short by a drug overdose at the age of thirty-two. Set in Paris and on the French Riviera, this final novel by the literary enfant terrible of the interwar Russian diaspora in France recounts the escapades, malaise, and love affairs of a bohemian group of Russian expatriates.”

We remain in between-the-wars France for Anna de Courcy’s Five Love Affairs and a Friendship: The Paris Life of Nancy Cunard, Icon of the Jazz Age. “Dazzlingly beautiful, highly intelligent and an extraordinary force of energy, Nancy Cunard was an icon of the Jazz Age, said to have inspired half the poets and novelists of the twenties.” A year ago the great Josephine Baker was interred in the Panthéon, in a ceremony which sadly did not feature the current head of the FBI on his knees begging forgiveness of Baker’s spirit for the Bureau’s vicious campaign of harassment during her lifetime. The Flame of Resistance by Damien Lewis (NB not the actor) is an anomaly in the writer’s oeuvre in that it is not about the SAS. But it is a tale of wartime heroism which finds Baker – “one of London’s most closely-guarded special agents” – undertaking enormously risky clandestine operations. “Baker’s secret war embodies a tale of unbounded courage, passion, devotion and sacrifice, and of deep and bitter tragedy, fueled by her own desire to combat the rise of Nazism, and to fight for all that is good and right in the world.” Josephine Baker often appears in those “awesome women in history” books you grab when you’re panic-buying for a 10-year-old girl’s birthday; how grotesquely unjust that she should have to appear alongside that vile collaborator, Coco Chanel. More Americans in Paris: in Strange Impressions we have extracts from the previously unpublished memoirs of painter Romaine Brooks. The author’s own title, which may give you an insight into her childhood and how it shaped her later life, was No Pleasant Memories.

Natalie Barney (her again!) is the one degree of separation between Brooks (her lover) and our next subject (her sister), who helped popularise the Baháʼí faith in the West, as we discover in The Life of Laura Barney. Author Mona Khademi “traces the journey of Laura Barney from her pampered childhood to her life as a feminist, global-thinker and peace-builder who was twice decorated by the French Legion of Honoré.” (Natalie) Barney biographer Suzanne Rodriguez is the author of Found Meals of the Lost Generation: People, Stories & Recipes from 1920s Paris, now reissued and with which, among other things, “…you can transform your living room into Gertrude Stein’s famous salon”. Stein features in Aging Moderns: Art, Literature, and the Experiment of Later Life, in which Scott Herring offers “portraits of writers and artists who sought out or employed unconventional methods and collaborations up until the early twenty-first century. Herring finds Djuna Barnes performing the principles of high modernism not only in poetry but also in pharmacy orders and grocery lists. In mystery novels featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas along with modernist souvenir collections, the gay writer Samuel Steward elaborated a queer theory of aging and challenged gay male ageism.”

Herring’s account includes a chapter on “The Harlem Renaissance as Told by ‘Lesbian Elder’ Mabel Hampton”, while a clutch of recent reissues introduces a new readership to the outstanding between-the-wars profusion of Black arts that was the Harlem Renaissance. They include The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes’s Not without Laughter, collections of short fiction and essays by Alice Dunbar Nelson and Zora Neale Hurston, respectively, Home to Harlem by Claude McKay (whose collected articles are now available in a single edition) and a convolute of Quicksand and Passing by Nella Larsen (the latter in a film adaptation last year). Passing is a dominant theme of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, now reissued by Everyman’s Library, and Alexandra Lapierre’s Belle Greene (translated by Tina Kover), a novelisation of the fascinating real life of Belle da Costa Greene, director of the private library of banker JP Morgan. “Flamboyant, brilliant, beautiful […] Belle is among New York society’s most sought after intellectuals. Although she looks white, she is African American, the daughter of a famous black activist who sees her desire to hide her origins as the consummate betrayal.”

The magnificent Morgan Library that Greene built up was recently the venue for a major exhibition on the life and work of provocateur Alfred Jarry, whose works are still being rediscovered in English. Speculations, translated by R J Dent, is a “darkly comic collection of surrealist and satirical prose pieces … everything is worthy material for his surreal satire; the Passion is presented as a sporting event; buses are the prey of big game hunters, and even the Queen is licked from behind”. Something for everyone, then. By this stage of our Satanic selection, when talk turns to the umbral delights of the Belle Epoque, regular readers will know to expect a slew of Snuggly titles – and this year is no exception. New anthologies address the classic fin-de-siècle trope of the femme fatale and collate occult-related fiction while a new collection of works by Hersh Dovid Nomberg bears the delightful title of Happiness and Other Fictions (translated by Daniel Kennedy, who has more translations from the Yiddish at Farlag Press). From the late-breaking (1923) Decadence of Hélène Picard’s Sabbat (translated by Brian Stableford): “Seeing Satan emerging from a poppy and accepting him as her poetic savior …” OK, stop right there and just take my money. Snuggly have an impressive list of works by the similarly outré Jane de la Vaudère, to which they now add The Priestesses of Mylitta (again translated by Brian Stableford). Set in Babylon, it introduces us to “the cult of the eponymous goddess, whose worship consists, in part, of newly married women delivering themselves to haphazard lovers, the story, which was very probably the author’s last completed work, is one of both tenderness and torture, brutal bloodshed and the adoration held in delicious kisses.” Each of these rediscoveries points to an uncommonly interesting creative force, so how fortunate that this year also brings the first English biography of the author, Resurrecting Jane de la Vaudère by Sharon Larson. “A controversial figure who was known as a plagiarist, La Vaudère attracted the attention of the public and of her peers, who caricatured her in literary periodicals and romans à clef. Most notably, La Vaudère claimed to have written the Rêve d’Egypte pantomime, whose 1907 production at the Moulin Rouge featured a kiss between Missy and Colette that led to riots and the suspension of future performances.” From the same era the fascinating polymath Victor Segalen looks back at one of his idols in the 1907 Le double Rimbaud, here in a bilingual edition (English translation by Blandine Longre and Paul Stubbs). “While disclosing the two Rimbauds that most interested him, the writer and the adventurer, the seer and the outlaw, Segalen aims at overlapping his own shadow with Rimbaud’s and walking beyond the signposts of his own mind so as to confront the two roads taken by the other poet, the imaginative one and the real one.”

I don’t at all hold with Britain’s Daily Telegraph, the mouthpiece of the party that has screwed the country from top to bottom, but they do a good obituary, with some of the more diverting recent examples to be found in Eccentric Lives: The Daily Telegraph Book of 21st Century Obituaries. It was a Telegraph obituary that sparked the classic account of butch fatale island despot Joe Carstairs; author Kate Summerscale returns with The Book of Phobias and Manias: A History of Obsession (whose cover bears the classic image of the divinely manic Countess de Castiglione – who died on this day in 1899). You name it, someone somewhere is turned on or terrified by it, as we discover in this “history of human strangeness, from the middle ages to the present day, and a wealth of explanations for some of our most powerful aversions and desires.” Obsession drives Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, “a carefully woven tapestry of death and melancholy that has seen numerous cinematic and operatic adaptations and inspired the source material for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo” (and also worked its way into Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Bougrelon). The translator is Will Stone, who also brings us the first English edition of Nietzsche in Italy, an account of the philosopher’s travels by Guy de Pourtalès first published in 1929 (which neatly complements Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin, mentioned above). Friedrich Nietzsche’s own Thus Spake Zarathustra is available in a new translation by Michael Hulse in which “Zarathustra is revealed in all his bold and ironic splendor as a man who prizes self-worth above all else as a moral code to live by.” Salomo Friedländer (who published as Mynona) was the author of an influential study of Nietzsche; like many writers born around the beginning of the German Empire, he was in thrall not just to Nietzsche’s thinking, but his magisterial prose as well. But in the slim volume Black – White – Red (translated by W. C. Bamberger), Mynona works in the “grotesque” form, a mode that was enjoying renewed attention from Germany’s avant-garde in the early 20th century, including writers like Hermann Harry Schmitz, Oskar Panizza and Else Lasker-Schüler (a fellow devotee of Nietzsche).

Reaching further back in German cultural history, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self explores ideas to which Strange Flowers is irresistibly drawn – the modern conception of personality that arose in the wake of the French Revolution. Alongside familiar figures like Goethe, Schiller and Hegel, author Andrea Wulf introduces us to writer and translator Caroline Schlegel, whose salon brought these and other minds together. “When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, How can I be free? It all began in a quiet university town in Germany in the 1790s …” Simultaneously, the dandies were modelling another conception of self-will; British Dandies by Dominic Janes “explores that social and cultural history through a focus on three figures: the macaroni, the dandy, and the aesthete. The first was noted for his flamboyance, the second for his austere perfectionism, and the third for his perversity.” Their spiritual descendants haunt Nino Strachey’s Young Bloomsbury, which describes the moment in the movement’s history when a “group of queer young creatives joined their ranks, pushing at gender boundaries, flouting conventions, spurring their seniors to new heights of artistic activity.” Subjects include Vita Sackville-West’s dazzlingly camp cousin Eddy, who furthered the early 20th-century tradition of the cultured country house in “England’s last literary salon” as related in Simon Fenwick’s The Crichel Boys. “Sackville-West, Shawe-Taylor and Knollys – later joined by the literary critic Raymond Mortimer – became members of one another’s surrogate families and their companionship became a stimulus for writing, for them and their guests. Long Crichel’s visitors’ book reveals a Who’s Who of the arts in post-war Britain – Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, Laurie Lee, Cyril Connolly, Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Cecil Beaton, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson – who were attracted by the good food, generous quantities of drink and excellent conversation”. Country house social experimentation of a different kind in Anna Neima’s Practical Utopia: The Many Lives of Dartington Hall, a progressive community inspired by Rabindranath Tagore. The invented tongue of the original Utopia, Thomas More’s, joins “the linguistic fantasies (or madness) of Georgian linguist Nikolai Marr and Swiss medium Hélène Smith; and considers the quest for the true philosophical language” in Marina Yaguello’s Imaginary Languages (translated by Erik Butler). The island of Redonda comes closer to the original meaning of the word “utopia”, or “non-place”. Redonda is a place, just – an uninhabited outcrop in the Caribbean which makes Joe Carstairs’s Big Whale Cay look positively continental. But in Try Not to Be Strange, we discover the bizarre and remarkably persistent mythology which arose around the island “kingdom” and its succession of underworld overlords, largely fabricated in the distant bohemian enclave of Fitzrovia. Author Michael Hingston presents “the complete history of Redonda’s transformation from an uninhabited, guano-encrusted island into a fantastical and international kingdom of writers. With a cast of characters including forgotten sci-fi novelists, alcoholic poets, vegetarian publishers, Nobel Prize frontrunners, and the bartenders who kept them all lubricated while angling for the throne themselves …”

And with this very Strange Flowers selection of misfits we draw our Satanic selection to a close. My own publishing venture is winding up, so rest assured this will be the last time I shill for Rixdorf Editions (though I can’t promise I won’t put out anything under my own name and tell you all about it!). Most titles are still available but they’re selling fast at the five-year anniversary price of five yo-yos; have a look here. It will all be over at the end of this year; they’ll be gone forever and this will have been nothing but a strange and beautiful dream.

Over the years I have written numerous times about the inexhaustibly fascinating life of Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898) – a.k.a. Sis(s)i – and its heady amalgam of eccentricity, disaster, glamour, beauty and melancholy. Whenever I do, I get angry comments from Sissi stans who scan the net for narratives that stray from their vision of the suffering Habsburg Madonna. There is no question that the Austrian Empress was shadowed by tragedy, as I have acknowledged, and it is impossible to understand her life without recognising the depression that pursued and frequently overtook her. But God forbid you should disturb these devotees’ image of Our Lady of Sorrows riding side-saddle through a vale of tears by suggesting that – misfortune notwithstanding – Sissi was just really goddam weird, a morbid, capricious, drug-addicted, tattooed narcissist; a high-strung, high-maintenance neurological high-wire act with a generous production budget.

While I never relish messages from Sissi’s self-appointed standard-bearers, I genuinely wonder what they make of the current profusion of Elisabethan offerings, in particular three current German-language screen productions with international reach (plus a recent series by German broadcaster RTL and a new English-language book, Empty Theatre by Jac Jemc). All of them take significant liberties with both the historical account and the popular image of Sissi established by Romy Schneider in a trilogy of Wirtschaftswunder-era films beloved of German-speaking Europe to this day. The last 12 months have given us Netflix series The Empress (showrunner Katharina Eyssen), and the feature films Corsage (director Marie Kreutzer), and Sisi & I (director Frauke Finsterwalder), which just premiered at this year’s Berlinale. Each of them occupies a restricted time span, representing the beginning, middle and end of Sissi’s reign, respectively.

The Empress arguably hews closest to the sanctified image. Devrim Lingnau persuasively embodies the headstrong teenage Bavarian princess who, having previously been left largely to her own devices, finds herself ill-equipped for married life let alone the unimaginable pressure of being imperial consort. This is very much a costume period drama and while its locations are not the historical settings, they are lavish enough that, as with The Crown, they competently maintain the illusion. The series concentrates on Sissi’s troubled onboarding at court and, like the 1950s trilogy, appoints Franz Joseph’s mother as the villain. So far so faithful, but this depiction also comes with departures from historical fact that contrast sharply with this evident quest for authenticity.

Witness, for example, the mutual passion between Sissi and Franz Joseph in the series, a romantic indulgence at odds with historical reality. We also find a confected episode of ill-fated Archduke Maximilian scheming to take over his brother’s empire and his wife, and an invented lady-in-waiting with revolutionary sympathies who gains the empress’s trust. Sissi’s interest in the underclass jars with the record, so too her engagement in realpolitik (beyond a genuine sympathy for Hungarian liberation). Like the recent Netflix series about Freud, The Empress freely embellishes widely known figures and events that arguably offer drama enough in themselves. Here, after six hours we are still only a few months into Elisabeth’s marriage; a further series is mooted, so will they follow The Crown by swapping out the leads and advancing through the decades?

If you’re impatient for the years of darkness and disquiet to come, two current films may satisfy your curiousity. They bear striking similarities; both are pan-European arthouse co-productions with women directors which foreground previously occluded episodes of the historical narrative. They both use modern music and other anachronisms, rejecting the conventions of period drama and toying with the idea of authenticity itself without proposing alternative histories as such. Each avails itself liberally of the drugs, tattoos, morbidity, narcissism and caprice supplied by an intimate reading of the subject’s life. Each makes much of Sissi’s devotion to her work-outs and beauty treatments, her eating disorder and public fainting, and contains a pivotal scene where the empress cuts her legendarily long hair. Each of them leans into the Diana connection by depicting Sissi’s (documented) visit with the princess’s ancestors at Althorp, where she enjoys breathless horse races and an enigmatic affair with a local.

Corsage was first to cinemas. Sissi, as portrayed by Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread), is adrift; her relationships with her husband, children and servants are all conducted at arm’s length. Her only kindred spirit appears to be her cousin Ludwig II, and even there she misreads his affections. As she turns 40 a tactless doctor informs her that this is the life expectancy for a working-class woman of the time. In fact the increasingly spectral Sissi appears to be engineering her own disappearance, clearing her schedule, outsourcing her public appearances to a veiled lady-in-waiting and grooming a railway official’s wife to serve as her husband’s mistress.

While some settings are accurate (Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace), elsewhere Corsage is provocatively ahistorical, unfolding in locations that are clearly, ostentatiously not what they purport to be. “Althorp” appears amid manifestly central European mountains, rather than the barely rolling hills of Northamptonshire I know from visits to my in-laws. Meanwhile the rough, backstage aesthetic of some interior scenes reminded me of the first time I visited Versailles. I was struck by the contrast between the labyrinthine, unadorned passageways and the sumptuous state rooms; passing from one to another felt like stepping out on stage. Corsage suggests that it is in the wings that we should locate the true personae of its subjects rather than their upholstered public avatars. Of course, this and the thin crowd scenes might simply reflect a limited budget. But this asceticism and the numerous post-dated features also seem driven by a kind of belligerence which dares us to take issue, urging us to abandon our preconceptions of historical drama. Strikingly, glass appears prominently in these anachronistic elements – light fixtures, eyewear, windows, doors, camera lenses, syringes – suggesting that we must look through these (literally) transparent distractions to find inner verities.

Visiting a psychiatric institution, Sissi bonds briefly with an inconsolable woman who, like her, has lost a daughter in infancy, yet otherwise the empress appears to be driven by morbid curiosity rather than any profound connection with the downtrodden among her subjects; “the lion doesn’t lose sleep over the opinions of sheep” as she avers. But there is little for us to hold on to. While audiences are surely sophisticated enough not to require every female lead to be likable or relatable, this is main character syndrome to excess, to the exclusion of all else, an exceptionalism that eclipses anything by which a mortal being might be expected to construct a liveable existence.

If Corsage presents a solipsistic drifter consumed by her own psychodrama, Sisi & I – as the title suggests – is essentially a two-hander, shot on 16 mm to create a dreamlike atmosphere. Here we see Sissi (Susanne Wolff) through the eyes of her lady-in-waiting Countess Irma Sztáray (Sandra Hüller, the embodiment of vexed dissatisfaction in Toni Erdmann). Her function is to keep pace with the restless empress, to accompany her as she stalks the landscape for hours at a time; this all squares with the record and even Irma’s seasickness is rooted in reality. As she arrives at Sissi’s idyllic, matriarchal island court (Malta standing in for Corfu) she is subjected to an entrance exam that is at once boot camp and hazing ritual. The most obvious anachronisms here are sartorial; the first image of the film is a corset, but on Corfu it is only gossipy gay Archduke Ludwig Viktor who appears to actually wear them (his drag theatricals ring true, but by this time real-life Sissi had fallen out with her brother-in-law). Long-dead, the other light-loafered Ludwig (II) here appears in spirit only, with a prophetic warning.

Scripted by the director and her husband Christian Kracht (author of Imperium in which he fictionalised Wilhelmine stowaway August Engelhardt), Sisi & I is primarily about friendship between women. But the bond depicted here comes with an enormous imbalance of power, subject to the whims of its manipulative senior partner; at one point Sissi insists that they embark for Algiers (Malta again) because she wants to try a local ice cream. Early on there is a suggestion of The Favourite, as the newcomer supplants a previous lady-in-waiting in the empress’s affections, but with Sissi bestowing and withdrawing her favour like the warmth of the sun, the abusive relationship of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant seems a more apt comparison. The film is a notionally queer reading yet admirably disinterested in examining the point at which relations may have transgressed the limits of passionate female friendships in the moral codes of the time. “Shame,” pronounces Sissi, “is for the bourgeoisie.”

Diet is central once again, with Sissi subsisting largely on thin soup and purging her occasional blow-outs. At one point she is more or less force-fed by her mother (what a treat to see Angela Winkler again!). Sissi’s relentless physical exertion, her beauty routine, her eating disorder were evidently driven less by vanity than a need to reclaim the agency cruelly wrested from her in the early years of her marriage. Sissi’s assassination is extensively foreshadowed throughout the film; when it comes it differs from the known facts in crucial details (no spoilers!). I wasn’t even sure if what I was seeing was deliberate; days later I still don’t know what to make of this scene.

The concurrence and extensive thematic overlap of the two films positively compel comparison. In both cases, variances with the record are conscious authorial choices that draw out some higher truth of the characters (in contrast with the fabrications of The Empress, which appear designed to keep fickle streaming audiences engaged at all costs). To sit scowling in the dark with a pen and pad noting solecisms – like one of my angry correspondents might do – is to misread the directors’ intentions entirely. The comparison between Sissi and Diana that both films evoke (also extensively explored in Andrew Sinclair’s 1998 book Death by Fame) is illuminating. For it is not just their unhappy marital relations, clashes with courtiers, eating disorders, depression and violent death that the two women share, but also the way their respective images have transformed in the public imagination. Most of us can contextualise the artistic swerves of a film like Spencer because, whether we’re actively interested or not, we have absorbed years of inside reports alongside the public record. We expect to see a portrayal that disrupts the sanctified image, otherwise – why bother?

But despite the presence of actors recognisable to monoplex-goers the world over, the public and private Elisabeth remains an Austro-German phenomenon – for now. Sisi & I and Corsage are both end-products of a process of (over-)familiarisation which most English-speakers, say, haven’t experienced; few of us grew up watching Romy Schneider’s portrayal every Christmas, like many Germans have. These new treatments seek to provide rich, subtle shading to selected parts of a portrait that most international audiences don’t even recognise in outline.

For my part, I found Sisi & I the more convincing of the two. Naturally I can’t say with certainty what Sissi was like (and in a Q&A session after the Berlinale screening, director Frauke Finsterwalder said she banned her actors from reading biographies of the empress). But drawing on my assumptions I felt Susanne Wolff better captured Sissi’s restlessness, caprice and neurosis, but just as importantly the crippling depression that engulfed much of her latter life. While Vicky Krieps’s empress radiates sadness, it is melancholy without rigour; it is difficult to imagine this wry, loose-limbed Sissi embarking on a punishing trek.

In either case, stans, you’re probably not going to like what you see in these films, but you know what? You can just ignore them (and me). The lioness is sleeping, the sheep are free to dream whatever they want.