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 diamond 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 — a curatorial decision that was both more honest and, as it turned out, more commercially interesting than simply leaning into the Schneider mythology would have been.

The first room confronts the visitor with both versions: the Winterhalter portrait on one wall, the promotional material from the Schneider films on another, and an explanatory text that makes the gap explicit. This is unusually honest curatorial practice for a major tourist attraction, particularly one that is partly sustained by the myth it is complicating. The decision to open with the contradiction rather than bury it is the museum’s most interesting editorial choice.

What follows is a museum of specific objects that resist sentimentality:

Elisabeth’s fitness equipment — the wall rings, the dumbbells, the horizontal bars she had installed in her apartments in the Hofburg, because she refused to lose the 50-centimetre waist she maintained throughout her adult life by a combination of obsessive exercise and near-starvation dieting. The equipment is displayed without comment that would soften it. It looks like what it is: the toolkit of an eating disorder maintained across decades by a woman powerful enough to impose her fixations on her own domestic environment.

Her travel pharmacy — packed and repacked for decades of movement across Europe. She never left without it, because she spent most of her adult life in transit, always moving. She was in Madeira, in Corfu (she built a palace there, the Achilleion, named for her favourite hero), in Hungary, in Bavaria, in the English hunting counties. Movement was, apparently, the only way she found to survive her role. The pharmacy is the physical residue of that restlessness.

Her Greek dictionary and language notes — she taught herself ancient and modern Greek to a level that impressed professional scholars, partly for the intellectual satisfaction of it and partly because it gave her something the Austrian court couldn’t follow or intrude upon. She translated Greek poetry. She corresponded with a Hungarian Greek scholar. She read Homer in the original. The dictionary in the case is worn at the pages she returned to most.

Her personal poetry — the journals she kept and never published, full of writing that is by turns furious, funny, and despairing. About the court. About her children and the impossible constraints of their upbringing. About Franz Joseph, whom she could not hate because she understood him too well. About the role of Empress, which she described in terms that would not be out of place in a 20th-century feminist critique of institutional gender roles.

The dresses

Several of Elisabeth’s dresses survive in the collection, and they make the waist figure tangible in a way that a number alone cannot. Fifty centimetres: hold up your hands with thumbs and middle fingers touching and you have the approximate circumference. 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” — a thin broth she lived on for extended periods — and the obsessive measurement journals.

The combination of the dress and the diet records is the museum’s most direct confrontation with the reality behind the Winterhalter portrait. The painting shows beauty; the dress shows the cost.

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 acknowledged beauty, her formidable intelligence, her social and political position, her constant travel, her language studies, her horsemanship — to resist a role that was genuinely impossible. She was the Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, and she exercised both titles as rarely as she could arrange.

Her relationship with Hungary is the most politically interesting thread in the collection. She learned Hungarian — fluently, in the testimony of contemporaries who were in a position to judge — and wore Hungarian fashion to Austrian court occasions, which was read correctly as a political statement. She was an active supporter of Hungarian interests during the negotiations over the Ausgleich (the Compromise of 1867 that created the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy), and her personal relationship with Hungary’s political establishment — particularly with Count Gyula Andrássy, the Hungarian prime minister, with whom she was closely if ambiguously connected — gave the Hungarian side diplomatic leverage it would not otherwise have had.

The Hungarians understood that she was on their side. They still revere her, in a way that has outlasted the reverence of most other Habsburg territories. The Gödöllő hunting palace outside Budapest, where she spent as much time as the demands of Vienna allowed, is maintained as a monument partly to her memory. The Austrian court, for its part, could not quite decide whether her Hungarian attachment was a betrayal or merely an eccentricity.

She was assassinated in Geneva on 10 September 1898 — stabbed with a sharpened needle file by Luigi Lucheni, an Italian anarchist who had decided to kill a famous person and found the Empress walking along the lakefront with a lady-in-waiting, en route to the steamer at the Quai du Mont-Blanc. The wound was so precise — the file so sharp, the blow so fast — that she did not know she had been stabbed until she collapsed on the gangplank. She died ninety minutes later, reportedly still not understanding what had happened.

Franz Joseph, who had loved her with a persistence she could neither fully accept nor entirely reject across 44 years of marriage, was told by telegram at Schönbrunn. He is reported to have said: “No one knows how much I loved this woman.” It is one of the most plaintive imperial sentences in the historical record.

Why the museum matters

The Sisi Museum is better than most palace museums precisely because it accepts that the person it memorialises was not a fairy tale. The exercise rings are not romantic. The diet records are disturbing. The Greek dictionary is remarkable. The letter she wrote to her daughter Marie Valerie, explaining that she had never wanted to be an empress — had never wanted any of the life that had been arranged for her at fifteen when Franz Joseph saw her at Bad Ischl and decided she would do — is devastating, and it is in the case, and you can stand there and read it.

The guided Hofburg and Sisi Museum tour gives this material the narrative context it needs — a knowledgeable guide makes the connections between objects explicit, explains the political circumstances that shaped her decisions at key moments, and delivers the story in a way that the room labels alone don’t quite achieve. The museum is good on its own; with a guide it becomes genuinely illuminating.

The Romy Schneider version of Sisi — the golden-haired ingénue, the romantic marriage, the fairytale court — is in some gift shops on the way out if you want it. The museum itself is in the Hofburg, and it is worth considerably more than the time the typical visit allocates to it. Elisabeth was difficult, brilliant, self-destructive, politically significant, and entirely unlike the character in the films. The museum knows this, and shows it.