She has been described as a Habsburg popstar, the first royal celebrity, the earliest example of a woman body-shamed by the media and a long undiscovered 19th century feminist icon.
Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, is now being brought to life again for the modern age with two new cinema films, two television series, including a Netflix biopic, as well as a novel.
The latest of them, Corsage, which opened in German cinemas on Thursday having premiered at Cannes in May, has shocked some critics with its departure from the traditionally romantic image of the empress towards a darker psychological study. Her suffering under the strictures of court life are embodied in the title. Scenes described as “painful to watch” depict Sisi, played by Vicky Krieps, being tied into her tiny corset and insisting that her maids, whose hands are raw with trying, make it ever tighter. Opening on her 40th birthday in 1877, when she is struggling to keep up with the expectation that she must remain ever youthful – fed on a diet of orange slices and beef broth - the film ends with a reportedly shocking scene, which critics have said is worthy of Quentin Tarantino.
The TV series Sisi, meanwhile, is a bleak portrait of her tempestuous marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph and her brutal exploitation at the hands of the Habsburgs as a pretty figurehead who merely saw in her a producer of a suitable heir to the throne. Received favourably so far, it has caused a stir with its candid portrayal of her sexuality.
Sisi, as she was more widely known, was most famously embodied in a hugely popular television trilogy of the 1950s by the German-Austrian actress Romy Schneider. Schneider later also starred as a more mature princess in a 1972 film by Luchino Visconti about her close friend, the gay, eccentric King Ludwig II of Bavaria. The actress later complained: “Sisi sticks to me just like oatmeal.”
A Bavarian princess before she was pinpointed as a suitable future wife for Franz Joseph and married off to him at the age of 16, producing four children, before being assassinated at the age of 60 by an Italian anarchist, Sisi famously balked at the restrictions of Habsburg court life. Dominique Devenport, who stars in the series Sisi, which is streaming on RTL+ in Germany, has said the character “works” as a relatable figure because of her strong female narrative. “She asks the questions people ask themselves today,” she told German media. “How can I stay true to myself, what decisions must I make, how do I meet the expectations everyone has of me?”
The Netflix series The Empress is due for release in the autumn, and is expected to join its rivals in helping to fuel a new interest in the aristocrat, who somewhat predictably has widely been compared to the late Princess Diana. Parallels have been made between Corsage, which was made by the Austrian filmmaker Marie Kreutzer, and the 2021 historical fiction drama by director Pablo Larrain, Spencer, about the tortured life of Diana.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung praised Kreutzer for turning the saccharine image of Sisi on its head, by showing her masturbating in the bath, smoking, giving the finger to courtiers, taking heroin to calm her nerves and calling her husband an arsehole. “Kreuzter has produced a shock therapy,” its critic wrote. He praises her for “freeing” Sisi from a “Romyschneiderisation, which Romy Schneider herself would have been the first to approve of”.
A novel by Karen Duve, due in September, is expected to flesh out yet another side of her character: a glowing hunter and dressage rider. Duve has described Sisi as an “undiscovered feminist icon”.
The Hofburg and Schönbrunn palaces in Vienna, where Sisi resided, have long been strong tourist magnets for those seeking to follow her trail. Her exercise rings and pommel horse, on which she is said to have excessively worked out daily, are among the main attractions, while her face adorns everything from chocolate boxes to opera glasses. Sisi’s story most recently proved a box office success in the German-speaking world as a stage musical, Elisabeth, which reached an audience of 10 million spectators between 1992 and 2019, but has never made it on to the English-speaking stage. It has produced a particularly strong cult following in Japan, where it has been staged.
But Austrian commentator Hans Rauscher has said that the repeated revival of the Sisi story has a more sinister pull. On the surface, he wrote in Der Standard, it is “the fascination of a beautiful young woman, the empress of a European imperium”, but in reality, he said, it is the rather more quotidian story of “an overwhelmed teenager who at 16 married her cousin, a pedantic bore, who infected her with an STD”. Describing the new takes as “more spicy, though just as undigestible” as the Romy Schneider depictions, he suggests the interest in Sisi has much to do with characteristics she displayedthat Austrians relate to – “depressive, rating obedience above freedom, neurotic” – which, he said, “maybe explains the Sisi cult”.
