Sisi on Screen: The Films Against the Record

There is a museum inside the Hofburg whose stated purpose is to contradict a set of films. That is unusual enough to be the most interesting thing about how Elisabeth is remembered — and it tells you how completely the screen version won.

The 1950s trilogy

Ernst Marischka’s Sissi films, starring the teenage Romy Schneider, appeared from 1955 and were enormous. They are Technicolor romances: a spirited Bavarian girl meets a young emperor, love conquers court protocol, and Austria gets a benign fairy tale about itself ten years after the war.

Their most durable achievement is a spelling mistake. Elisabeth was called Sisi within the family and always wrote it with one s. The operator of the Sisi Museum states this on its own FAQ in as many words: she “always spelled her name with one ‘s’. Thus, the correct spelling is ‘Sisi’.” The double-s comes from Marischka’s titles, and it is still how most people write it.

If a film can change how a real person’s name is spelled seventy years later, it is fair to assume it changed other things.

What the films leave out

Set the trilogy against the documented record and the omissions are not small ones.

The films end where the difficulty starts. They give you the courtship, the wedding and the early years, and stop. What they do not have room for is a marriage the empress found unendurable, a mother-in-law who took charge of her children, and a woman who spent the rest of her life travelling to be anywhere but Vienna.

They have nothing to say about the physical regime: the 40 cm waist at its narrowest, the fasting cures, the beefsteak juice, the weighing three times a day, the 43.5 kg she was down to by 1894. Historians reading the same documents have described the pattern as anorexia nervosa; a professor of psychology, Walter Vandereycken, has written that the sources “repeatedly describe her considerable fear of weight gain and the psychopathological changes specific for anorexia nervosa.”

They do not deal with her son Rudolf’s suicide at Mayerling in 1889, or with her own murder in Geneva in 1898, because a trilogy that ended with an anarchist’s file through the heart would not have been the film Austria wanted in 1955.

The recent series

Elisabeth has had a substantial revival on screen — a Netflix series, a feature film and a good deal else — and the newer versions are consciously darker. They take the corset, the hunger and the boredom as their subject rather than skipping them.

Whether that makes them accurate is a separate question, and mostly the answer is no. They are doing what the 1950s films did with the opposite polarity: using a real woman as material for the story their audience currently wants. A version that makes her a proto-feminist rebel is as much an invention as a version that makes her a singing bride, even though the second is closer to the documents.

Two things nearly all of them still get wrong. Her height and stature: she was 1.73 m, unusually tall for her time, which rarely survives casting. And the duration: she was Empress of Austria for forty-four years, and she was sixty when she died.

What the museum says

The Sisi Museum opened in 2004 in her own apartments in the Hofburg, designed by Rolf Langenfass and built around her poetry. Its framing is explicitly corrective — it exists to set what is documented against what is popularly believed — and the objects are how it makes the case.

That is an unusual thing for a national museum to do, and it makes the visit better. You are not being sold the romance; you are being shown the evidence against it, in the rooms where it happened.

What to read and watch instead

The strongest single primary source is the account left by her Greek tutor, Constantine Christomanos, who recorded her talking during the hours her hair was being dressed. It is where the line about her mind escaping through her hair onto the fingers of her hairdresser comes from, and nothing dramatised has improved on it.

Beyond that, Brigitte Hamann’s biography is the standard scholarly life and is the source most of the serious material descends from.

And then the three places in Vienna: the Sisi Museum for the argument, the Imperial Crypt on the Neuer Markt for the grave, and the Volksgarten monument for what the city decided to build in her memory. Between them they cover more ground than any of the films.