Sisi: the myth and the museum
The Sisi that most people visit Vienna to see doesn’t quite exist. She is a composite — part Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837–1898), part the character played by Romy Schneider in the three Sissi films of the 1950s, and part the enormous Habsburg tourism industry that has been building on both for sixty years. The portrait on the chocolate boxes, on the 1€ souvenir pins, on the life-sized cardboard cutouts in the Hofburg gift shop — all of these images derive from Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s 1865 portrait of a 28-year-old woman in a white ball gown with stars in her hair.
The museum in the Hofburg is trying to do something different. It largely succeeds.
What the Sisi Museum contains
The Sisi Museum occupies 21 rooms on the first floor of the Hofburg’s Amalienburg wing. It opened in 2004 as a deliberate attempt to present the historical Elisabeth rather than the film character.
The first room confronts the visitor with both: the Winterhalter portrait on one wall, the promotional material from the Schneider films on another, and an explanatory text making the gap explicit. This is unusually honest curatorial practice for a major tourist attraction.
What follows is a museum of specific objects that resist sentimentality: Elisabeth’s fitness equipment (the wall rings, the dumbbells, the parallel bars she had installed in her rooms in the Hofburg because she refused to lose the 50-cm waist she maintained throughout her adult life by obsessive exercise and near-starvation dieting); her travel pharmacy (she never left without it, since she spent most of her adult life in transit, always moving, as if movement was the only way to survive her role); her Greek dictionary (she taught herself ancient and modern Greek to a degree that impressed scholars, partly to have something the Austrian court couldn’t share); her personal poetry (the journals she kept, never published in her lifetime, full of furious writing about the court, the marriages she was forced to attend, the role that was killing her).
The dresses — several survive in the collection — make the waist real. Fifty centimetres at the time of the Winterhalter portrait. She had the measurements taken obsessively. The dress on display has a waist so narrow it does not look like an adult woman’s clothing. Next to it, the diet records: the starvation schedules, the orange juice fasts, the “beef tea” she lived on at times.
What the museum argues
The curatorial argument of the Sisi Museum is that Elisabeth was a woman who used every tool available to her — her beauty, her intelligence, her constant travel, her Greek studies, her horsemanship — to resist a role that was impossible. She was the Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary and she used both titles as rarely as she could manage.
Her relationship with Hungary is the most politically interesting thread. She learned Hungarian (fluently — contemporaries testified to this), wore Hungarian fashion to Austrian court occasions, supported Hungarian political interests during the negotiations over the Dual Monarchy (Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1867), and spent as much time as possible at the Gödöllő hunting palace outside Budapest. The Hungarians, who still revere her, understood that she was on their side. The Austrian court, which tolerated her, was less certain.
She was assassinated in Geneva on 10 September 1898 — stabbed with a sharpened file by Luigi Lucheni, an Italian anarchist who wanted to kill a famous person and found the Empress walking along the lake with a lady-in-waiting. She didn’t know she had been stabbed (the file was too sharp and the wound too neat) until she collapsed on the gangplank of the ship. She died ninety minutes later.
Franz Joseph, who had loved her and failed to understand her for 44 years, was told by telegram. He is reported to have said: “No one knows how much I loved this woman.”
Why the museum matters
The Sisi Museum is better than most palace museums precisely because it accepts that the person it is memorialising was not a fairy tale. The exercise rings are not romantic. The diet records are disturbing. The Greek dictionary is extraordinary. The letter she wrote to her daughter Marie Valerie, explaining that she had never wanted to be an empress, is devastating.
The guided Hofburg and Sisi Museum tour gives this material the narrative context it needs — a knowledgeable guide makes the connections between the objects explicit, explains the political circumstances that shaped her decisions, and delivers the story in a way that the room labels alone don’t quite achieve.
The Romy Schneider version of Sisi — the golden-haired ingénue, the romantic marriage, the fairytale empire — is in some gift shops if you want it. The museum is in the Hofburg, and it is worth the detour from the version on the chocolate boxes.