On August 21, 1888—in the midst of his affair with Mary Vetsera—Rudolf had turned thirty. “The age of thirty marks a dividing point in life,” he had written to a friend, “and one that is not too pleasant, either. Much time has passed, spent more or less usefully, but empty as far as real acts and successes are concerned. We are living in a time of slow, drawn-out rottenness.… Each year makes me older, less fresh, and less efficient.… And this eternal preparing of oneself, this constant waiting for great times of reform, wears out one’s creative power.… However, I must believe in the future. I hope and count on the next ten years.”1
Three days earlier Rudolf had suffered through a stifling charade of familial happiness when Franz Josef celebrated his fifty-eighth birthday at Bad Ischl. With his graying, bushy whiskers and mustache, the emperor personified the unchanging traditions his son despised; unable to contain his irritation, Rudolf offended everyone by denouncing his father’s beloved alpine resort as “a frightful hole.”2 The empire’s crown prince was tired of waiting—waiting for his father’s approval, waiting for a meaningful role, waiting for a change in the country’s cautious, conservative politics. On the morning of his own birthday Rudolf gave vent to long-simmering frustrations with a gesture of contempt, shaving off his beard and leaving only a long mustache modeled on those worn by Hungarian hussars.3 The rebellious meaning was clear: Rudolf had broken with his father, with his conservative politics, and with Austria.
This rebellion had been long in coming. Great hopes burdened Rudolf’s thin shoulders. He would be “a Habsburg philosopher on the throne,” the “head of all modern thought,” someone who would use his “striking intellectual gifts and unusual abilities” to fundamentally transform his father’s archaic empire.4 “He knew,” insisted a courtier, “that his father’s policy of hesitation and half measures could be pernicious to the monarchy,” and wanted “to open wide the firmly closed windows of the Imperial Palace and let in bright, refreshing air.”5 Viewing intellectuals and a prosperous middle class as guarantors of the empire’s survival, Rudolf entertained himself with visions of breaking Vienna’s centralized power in favor of increased regional and ethnic autonomy. He rebelled against anything that smacked of conservatism or carried a whiff of religious influence, and summed up this mood in his first will, written in April 1879: “I have trodden a different path from that of most of my relations, but always from the purest motives. Our age requires new points of view. Everywhere, especially in Austria, there is reaction, which is the first step toward a downfall. Those who preach reaction are the most dangerous enemies.”6
Among those “dangerous enemies” was Franz Josef’s prime minister, Count Eduard von Taaffe, who held the post from 1879 to 1893. Taaffe hailed from an Irish family that had immigrated to Austria during the Thirty Years’ War and served at court and in the military. The emperor had known him since childhood, when the two boys often played together; Taaffe was the only person outside the imperial family allowed to call the emperor by his first name, though he was rigidly correct, addressing him publicly as “Your Majesty.”7 Taaffe walked a fine line between mild reform and reactionary repression. “Muddling along in the old rut,” was how one wit characterized the prime minister’s opportunistic program of granting illusory autonomy to competing nationalities to keep them dependent on the throne.8 This brought temporary stability but at a price: Taaffe ruthlessly crushed opposition and unwelcome hints of liberalism: In his first year as prime minister, 635 newspapers alone were seized and destroyed.9
“Taaffe’s manure heap,” Rudolf called the prime minister’s political alliances, composed of “crafty schemers” filled with “fanaticism, delusion, stupidity, infinite cunning, lack of principle, every unpatriotic feeling, Jesuit adroitness and boundless lust for power.”10 In December 1881 Rudolf had boldly given his father a twenty-page memorandum outlining the dangers he perceived in Taaffe’s policies and asked that the prime minister be removed from office.11 “I can see plainly the slope down which we are slipping backwards,” he had confided to Latour von Thurmberg; “I am intimately connected with affairs but can do absolutely nothing; I may not even speak up to express my feelings and beliefs.” Taaffe, he complained, did not “even admit my right to hold an independent opinion,” and dismissed him as “insolent and a rebel.” His father’s attitudes—“clerical, intransigent, distrustful”—led Rudolf to fear for the future. The memorandum, he insisted, contained “nothing of rebellion: it is not the voice of one who desires the limelight but is the voice of distress, giving counsel.… Will the Emperor take this little work seriously, or will he just glance through it in the evening before retiring and lay it in a file, taking it as the eccentricity of a dreamer?”12
As Rudolf had feared, Franz Josef did not even bother to acknowledge his son’s memorandum. Rudolf fought back. His network of friends and advisers included not only professors and philosophers but also radicals and his father’s political opponents. Now he used his friendship with Moritz Szeps, the Jewish editor of the popular liberal newspaper Neues Wiener Tagblatt, to advance his own agenda. Rudolf had first met Szeps in 1880; intrigued by the editor’s liberal ideas, he began writing anonymous articles for the newspaper critical of the empire’s policies and foreign alliances. This didn’t remain a secret for long: Rudolf’s every move was shadowed. “They are becoming very watchful and suspicious of me,” he confided to Szeps, “and every day I see more clearly the narrow circle of espionage, denunciations and supervision surrounding me.”13
Rudolf had a tendency toward paranoia, but in this case his fears were well founded. One particularly watchful enemy was his own great-uncle Archduke Albrecht, Inspector General of the Imperial and Royal Armed Forces. Humorless and deeply conservative, he regarded it as a sacred duty to preserve Habsburg honor and prestige.14 Rudolf had a prickly relationship with the elderly archduke: Albrecht, the crown prince complained to his cousin Franz Ferdinand, “loves poking his nose about, picking quarrels, intriguing, and doing harm, for he is malicious.”15 Rudolf soon learned that Albrecht was actively spying on him, intercepting most of his correspondence and forwarding it to the emperor. “All journalists,” Albrecht warned Franz Josef, “are Jews conspiring against man’s most sacred heritage”; Szeps, “a thief and a swindler,” was filling the crown prince’s head with untenable political notions.16
Officialdom retaliated: To silence Rudolf, the government closed Szeps’s newspaper. “We have embarked on a catastrophic policy and it seems that no one can alter it now,” Rudolf complained. “We are being driven into darkness by fate, and it’s partly the work of the Jesuits, who are closely connected with all the most influential members of the Imperial Family.”17 In 1885 a mob led by Georg von Schönerer, head of the anti-Semitic German National Party, broke into the offices of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, vandalized equipment, and beat the employees. Szeps was actually found guilty of having libeled Schönerer and spent several months in prison. Rudolf felt responsible: When Szeps was released, the crown prince gave his friend money to found a new newspaper, the Wiener Tagblatt, in which he continued to promote his liberal ideas.18
“In Austria,” Rudolf complained, “I belong to the least informed group.”19 He was pointedly “excluded from all political information”; the lowest chamberlain at court, he believed, “has a wider influence on activities than do I. I am condemned to idleness.”20 Franz Josef tried to appease his son by ordering Austria’s foreign minister, Count Gustav Kálnoky, and the departmental head of the Ministry of the Royal Household and of Foreign Affairs for Hungary, Ladislaus von Szögyény-Marich, to begin briefing his heir on the empire’s foreign policies.21 He also named Rudolf inspector general of the infantry in early 1888. But neither effort succeeded. Rudolf indiscreetly began sharing confidential political information with Szeps and others in his circle, and diplomatic secrets leaked out and appeared in the pages of Vienna’s newspapers. When word of this inevitably got back to the Hofburg, Franz Josef ordered that his ministers were to brief his son only on minor issues and provide him with outdated documents.22 And Rudolf’s post as inspector general of the infantry carried no power, only demands that he attend reviews and visit regiments: It was busywork, meant to occupy his time and keep him out of trouble.23 This much Rudolf learned when his father barred him from military councils and refused him any say in important decisions.24
Franz Josef never understood his son or appreciated his talents, which were considerable. In 1878, working with the economist Karl Menger, Rudolf had produced a provocative—and anonymously published—critique of Austria’s aristocrats, deriding their idleness and deeming them frivolous hedonists unfit to serve whether as army officers or as high government officials.25 Rudolf was able to put his name to the 1883 publication of Fifteen Days on the Danube, an engaging chronicle of one of his hunting expeditions, which won him an honorary doctorate from Vienna University.26 In 1884 he published an account of his 1881 journey to the Middle East, in which he more fully displayed a gifted literary style, but he soon turned his attention inward, producing the first part of a multivolume encyclopedic work, Die Österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild (The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Words and Pictures), meant to chronicle his father’s empire. Franz Josef was so surprised by the erudite tone of his son’s introduction that he insultingly asked if Rudolf had really written the words.27
Rudolf’s complaint was that of royal heirs the world over: lack of a “proper” job. Queen Victoria, disappointed in her eldest son’s wayward behavior, refused to allow the Prince of Wales any meaningful role, while in Prussia the elderly Kaiser Wilhelm I clung tenaciously to his throne as his ambitious, liberal-minded heir, Friedrich Wilhelm, languished in the shadows of power even as cancer consumed him. A life of indolence, with Rudolf reduced to the role of decorative prop at his father’s court, stretched out before the crown prince.28 His own belief in the providential nature of his position made Franz Josef temperamentally unsuited to share power, and he expected his heir to conform to and support his ideas. But father and son were poles apart when it came to their political views: Rudolf’s embrace of liberalism, though born of conviction, seemed a personal affront, a rejection of all that the emperor believed and held dear. Franz Josef had treated his brother Maximilian in much the same way. “My individuality,” the archduke once declared, “does not fit the views of my older brother; he lets me feel this on every occasion in a most unequivocal, inconsiderate and insulting manner.”29
“The Emperor,” Latour von Thurmberg complained, “could have intervened most successfully if he had kept the Crown Prince’s mind occupied, initiated him into the business of government, and made him play his part. Serious, productive work would have taken up the whole of the Crown Prince’s time.”30 Latour von Thurmberg, though, was being too optimistic. Although Rudolf posed as a deep-thinking intellectual, his political convictions were often rashly formed and poorly considered. He had vision and talent, but he was too impatient and never appreciated his father’s steadfast approach—born of experience—to political issues. Rudolf wanted immediate change. While promoting himself as an enlightened prince seeking equality, he could not see beyond the narrow scope of preserving Habsburg rule as necessary for the empire’s continuation. In publicly agitating against his father, and by sharing sensitive political and diplomatic information, Rudolf destroyed his father’s trust and undermined Franz Josef’s one attempt to involve his son in governmental affairs.
Rudolf remained a man without power or influence. Heir to one of Europe’s oldest royal dynasties, he was forbidden to exercise his intellect or explore his political ideas. Convinced that nothing would change, that he was—until his father died—condemned to a twilight world as a passive onlooker, Rudolf grew embittered and sank into depression. Temporarily reunited with her mercurial husband on a joint visit to Sarajevo in the summer of 1888, Stephanie saw “an alarming change” in Rudolf: “It was not only that he was more restless and distraught than before,” she wrote. “In addition he had become prone to outbursts of fierce anger upon the most trifling occasions. I had long become accustomed to the fact that the conventionalities of our life together as husband and wife, especially as our relationship found expression in his letters, contrasted glaringly with Rudolf’s actual everyday behavior. Now however he was often quite unrecognizable. His inward disorganization led to terrible attacks of wrath, to intolerable and undignified scenes. It was as if, with the loss of inward stability, he had also lost any sense of good form. On such occasions he would not hesitate to talk to me openly about his distasteful amours.”31
It wasn’t just an embittered wife who noticed the change. A few months earlier Marie Valerie had confided to her diary: “Rudolf stares at us, particularly at Mama and me, with glances of such deep and bitter hate that one is overcome with a feeling of anxiety. Even Gisela, whose sober views certainly don’t lend themselves to imagination and whose love for Rudolf tends always to embellish his behavior, confessed … she was frightened herself by his stare and eventually all three of us broke out in tears.… This odd, unexplainable hatred of Rudolf’s casts a dark shadow over our future.”32
A growing sense of menace now surrounded Rudolf. Restless and irritable, he rarely slept more than four or five hours a night.33 Headaches, painful joints, and eye infections—symptoms of his gonorrhea—recurred with uncomfortable regularity.34 Rudolf was now giving himself half-gram injections of morphine several times a day; when his court physician, Hermann Widerhofer, suggested that he cut the amount to a quarter gram, Rudolf ignored him and actually increased the dosage.35 He was also downing copious amounts of Cognac and Champagne until drunk; more than once members of his suite had to intervene and whisk the crown prince away from some ceremony before he caused a scandal.36
Rudolf’s life spiraled into chaos that autumn of 1888. There had been no invitation to attend the spring Army High Command conference, and he was excluded from the autumn meeting as well.37 Frustrated, Rudolf submitted a report to his father suggesting military reforms; Franz Josef passed it on to Archduke Albrecht, who in his reply derided the crown prince’s ideas as attempts to “make up” for his own “deficiencies” as inspector general of the infantry.38
An incident that autumn reinforced Rudolf’s sense of despair. He’d once placed great hopes on the accession of his Prussian counterpart, the liberal Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, envisioning a time after Franz Josef’s death when together they could reshape European politics. Unfortunately fate intervened. When old Kaiser Wilhelm I died in 1888 and his son took the throne as Friedrich III, the new emperor was already dying of throat cancer. After a reign of just three months, Friedrich’s premature death placed his son on the German throne as Wilhelm II. Rudolf had long despised the brash, militaristic new kaiser, and the feeling was mutual. Rudolf, Wilhelm rather hypocritically complained, “did not take religion at all seriously and it pained me when he poured out his mordant wit not only on the church and clergy but also on the simple faith of the country folk.”39
Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Vienna that October of 1888. During a routine military inspection he belittled Rudolf’s infantry and complained that their newly adopted Mannlicher rifles were unfit for use in any armed conflict. As the head of Austria-Hungary’s principal military ally, the kaiser wanted Rudolf stripped of his position as inspector general. Unwilling to provoke the volatile young kaiser, Franz Josef gave in and asked his son to resign. Rudolf angrily refused.40 Soon a spate of unflattering articles highly critical of Rudolf began appearing in the German press. There were veiled references to an unnamed “august personage” in Austria who not only hated Germans and Germany but who was also leading a remarkably dissolute life—charges picked up and reprinted in certain French and Italian journals. True to form, Rudolf fired back, anonymously writing anti-Prussian articles for the Wiener Tagblatt and for a new Austrian journal, Schwarz-Gelb (Yellow-Black), which he helped fund.41 Rudolf also let his friend Moritz Szeps know that the young kaiser was then embroiled in an affair with an Austrian woman of dubious reputation, who had stolen Wilhelm’s monogrammed cuff links as proof. If the attacks in the German papers didn’t stop, Rudolf suggested, Szeps should publish the damning information about Wilhelm II.42
“I no longer find it within me to worry about anything at all,” Rudolf confided to Latour von Thurmberg that October.43 His mental detachment from previous interests, friends, and pursuits increased as the months passed.44 “The pursuit of high ideals has died within me,” Rudolf wrote to Szeps in November.45 And his behavior had grown increasingly reckless. In January he’d been out shooting with his father at Höllgraben when he carelessly discharged his rifle: The bullet missed Franz Josef by mere inches and seriously wounded a beater in the arm.46 Furious, the emperor barred his son from shooting the following day and refused to speak to him. According to Stephanie he suspected that Rudolf had meant to kill him and disguise it as an accident; afraid of his son, the emperor now avoided Rudolf and would see him only if others were present.47
By the autumn of 1888 the few remaining members of Rudolf’s circle found him nervous and antagonistic.48 “The Crown Prince recently took supper with me,” wrote Franz Karl, Prince Khevenhüller-Metsch. “He then lay on the sofa in the library smoking and drinking sherry. He babbled away incongruously about liberty and equality, railed against the nobility for representing an attitude whose time had passed and stated that his preferred position would be president of a republic. I thought, You are either intoxicated or you are a fool.”49
Stephanie got an unwelcome taste of Rudolf’s decline when she returned to Vienna from a holiday: “His decay was so greatly advanced as to have become conspicuous. He was frightfully changed: his skin was flaccid, his eyes were restless, his expression was completely changed. It seemed … as if a process of internal dissolution was going on. I was profoundly sorry for him and wondered how the devastation would end.” Concerned and anxious to “save us both from disaster,” Stephanie went unannounced to the emperor. “I began,” she recalled, “by telling him that Rudolf was extremely ill, and that my husband’s appearance and behavior caused me great anxiety. I earnestly begged the Emperor to send his son on a journey round the world, which might remove him from a life that was wearing him down.” But Franz Josef interrupted. “You are giving way to fancies, my dear,” he condescendingly told his daughter-in-law. “There is nothing wrong with Rudolf. I know he is rather pale, gets about too much, expects too much of himself. He ought to stay home with you more than he does. Don’t be anxious.” With this he arose and embraced Stephanie. “I had been dismissed, and had not been allowed to pour out my heart in the way I expected.” An official soon called on Stephanie: In the future the emperor wanted her to follow protocol and approach him only by asking his adjutant for a formal audience.50
Empress Elisabeth, too, worried about her son, though unlike Stephanie she failed to act. That autumn her youngest daughter and favorite child, Marie Valerie, was about to become engaged to Archduke Franz Salvator. Something about Rudolf’s behavior unnerved her. “Never be nasty to Valerie,” she warned her son.51 Visiting Vienna from her married home in Bavaria, Gisela found that “the whole family” now regarded Rudolf “as a person to be treated with caution.”52 For her part Marie Valerie was so afraid of her volatile brother that she kept word of her impending engagement from him until the middle of December. Rudolf, she confided to her diary, had an “unstable, often bitter, sarcastic expression” that made her fear being alone with him.53
Thoughts of death increasingly filled Rudolf’s head. Vienna celebrated its supremacy in coffee, pastries, and waltzes, yet it also held the unwelcome distinction of having Europe’s highest suicide rate.54 “At the slightest difficulty these people meet,” Walburga Paget recorded in astonishment, “they at once resort to suicide. There must be something in the air of Vienna that makes people do this.”55 Servants, she noted, “kill themselves because they break a plate, children of seven or eight hang themselves because they cannot do a lesson, soldiers because they do not like the army, girls because they cannot marry their first loves.” The situation was so bad, she remembered, that officials actually warned her to avoid early-morning rides in the Prater before they could cut down the previous evening’s suicides hanging from the trees.56
Rudolf eagerly consumed florid accounts of the latest suicides that Vienna’s newspapers spun out to shock their readers.57 There was the handsome young couple who, having enjoyed a last luncheon of chicken and Champagne, entered a cemetery and shot themselves; the woman aboard the express to Budapest who changed into a wedding dress before leaping to her death from the speeding train; and the young student who poisoned himself and his girlfriend after receiving low marks at school.58 One woman loyally sang the national anthem, then leaped from her third-floor Vienna apartment; a tightrope walker hanged himself from a window, declaring in a note, “The rope was my life and the rope is my death”; in the middle of his performance a trapeze artist who had quarreled with his wife deliberately let go and plummeted to his death.59 When the Hungarian sportsman István Kégl shot himself, Rudolf could talk of nothing else, devouring all the details, including the fact that Kégl had used a small hand-held mirror to adjust his aim.60 The more theatrical the exit, the more Vienna’s newspapers lingered over the details. Suicide had become entertainment, obsession with death the latest fashion.
By the autumn of 1888 Rudolf’s fascination with death had shifted to an unwholesome embrace. “From time to time,” Rudolf wrote to Latour von Thurmberg in October, “I look for an opportunity to see a dying person and attempt to enter into his sensations as he draws his last breath. I also make it a practice to intensely study dying animals, and attempt to accustom my wife to such sights, for one must learn to reckon with the last necessities of life.”61
A devastating escalation of circumstances and events, both minor and major, began to prey on Rudolf’s mind. “You know how badly Stephanie and I get on,” he once confided to Marie Larisch. He had infected his wife with venereal disease, caused her sterility, and deprived himself of an heir. Painful symptoms of his gonorrhea came and went without warning, fueling Rudolf’s escalating descent into alcoholism and drug addiction. Depression, anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy left him alienated and embittered. “Altogether I’m in a bad way,” he told Larisch. “I’m tired of life.” He was a “despicable puppet,” someone “dressed up to please the people,” with no purpose in life other than to await his father’s demise.62
Rudolf took his repeated exclusion from the Army High Command conferences, his clashes with Archduke Albrecht, and his father’s request that he resign his post as inspector general of the infantry as humiliating personal and professional failures. The death of the liberal German emperor Friedrich III tore away at Rudolf’s hopes for the future, while a chance political victory by Prime Minister Taaffe in the autumn of 1888 cemented his bitter enemy in power and ensured that his opinions and ideas would continue to be rejected. On top of this the persistent attacks on Rudolf in the German press shamed the crown prince by presenting him as the disreputable “other,” an unbalanced man unfit for the Habsburg throne.
The accumulated blows led to talk of suicide. At first it was loose talk, the kind of talk that consumed suicide-mad Vienna. In his erratic, unpredictable way, Rudolf spoke of suicide to his cousins Archdukes Johann Salvator, Franz Ferdinand, and Otto, as well as to the Duke of Braganza.63 Once he even pointed to Franz Ferdinand during a shoot, announcing, “That man walking toward us will become Emperor of Austria.”64 It seemed like a bad joke: No one took him seriously. There was something so lighthearted, so cavalier, about Rudolf’s manner—even Mitzi Caspar thought so when, in the midst of his affair with Mary Vetsera, he’d suddenly talked about killing himself. But Mitzi laughed off the idea as the result of too much alcohol and morphine.65
But the loose talk solidified that autumn as Rudolf began asking members of his staff to join him in a suicide pact. Lieutenant Viktor von Fritsche, Rudolf’s personal secretary, was stunned when the crown prince asked if he would die with him; although he considered it a great honor, Fritsche explained, he was unwilling to kill himself. Rudolf then turned to Flügeladjutant Baron Artur Giesl von Gieslingen, one of his staff officers; but Giesl, like Fritsche, had no wish to die and politely declined the request.66 This unnerving state of affairs led many men on the crown prince’s staff to ask for reassignment.67 Rudolf even threatened Stephanie, raging that he was going to shoot her and then himself.68
In December Rudolf again asked Mitzi to join him in a suicide pact, saying that honor demanded that he kill himself: They would shoot themselves in the Husarentempel at Mödling in a spectacularly symbolic coup de théâtre. Erected to the glory of hussars who had fallen in the emperor’s service, the temple offered Rudolf an altar on which he could make the ultimate gesture of contempt for his father’s conservative ideas of heroic loyalty.69 This time Mitzi didn’t laugh off the suggestion. Something about Rudolf’s manner scared her, and she apparently reported his request to the Viennese chief of police, Baron Franz von Krauss. Krauss was not receptive: Ignoring her information, he threatened to prosecute Mitzi if she repeated a word of the crown prince’s plea to anyone else.70
Three aromatic blue fir trees, branches alight with wax candles and bedecked with gilded ornaments, stood over tables crowded with gifts when the imperial family gathered at the Hofburg to celebrate Christmas. Rudolf had bought toys for his young daughter at Vienna’s traditional Christkindlmarkt, or Christmas market; for his mother he had purchased some original letters written by her favorite poet, Heinrich Heine—a thoughtful gift that the empress all but ignored.71 Indeed, Elisabeth seemed most taken with showing off her latest, unlikely acquisition: Much to her husband’s horror, she’d had her shoulder tattooed with an anchor.72
Smiles and gifts couldn’t conceal the undercurrent of tension. Something was so obviously wrong with Rudolf that Elisabeth pulled Marie Valerie aside and again warned her of her brother’s malicious behavior. Then she turned to her son. After making him promise that he would be kind to Marie Valerie, Elisabeth embraced Rudolf and said that she loved him. Hearing this, Rudolf collapsed into agonized sobs; his mother, he cried, hadn’t said those words “for a long time.”73 Franz Josef and Elisabeth were embarrassed at the display; neither recognized their son’s emotional breakdown as a last, dramatic cry for help as Rudolf slipped ever closer to the edge of an abyss.