Read Online B008AITH44 EBOK by Brigitte Hamann - Free Book Online Page A

in the 1880s—forms the basis of the present study. These lines provide Elisabeth’s most intimate and personal statements about herself, about the world around her, and about her times. But they also clearly show her failure; for the poems in no way justify Elisabeth’s hope for posthumous fame. The lines are interesting not for their literary worth (the dilettantism of the Heine imitation is hard to ignore or gloss over); rather, as the work of an empress and queen, they furnish us with source material for the history of the Habsburg monarchy as well as the intellectual history of an enlightened aristocrat, a cultured woman of the nineteenth century. Finally, Elisabeth’s poetry serves to illustrate the “nervous century,” with an emotional life often transcending the limits of reality.
        
    I am deeply grateful to the Swiss federal government and the directors of the Swiss Federal Archives in Bern for granting me permission for the first perusal of these sources, which were kept under strictest secrecy until now. Our friend Dr. Prof. Jean-Rudolf von Salis graciously used his good offices to secure this permission. The circumstance that the Empress entrusted what she believed to be her most valuable possession, her literary bequest, to a republic (though the one she considered the prototype and ideal) best characterizes her attitude to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as well as to the House of Habsburg.
    Besides the Empress’s literary estate, I worked through still other new sources, such as the documents referring to Elisabeth in the archives of Archduke Albrecht (Hungarian State Archives, Budapest); Privy Councillor Baron Adolf von Braun (Imperial Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna); the Imperial Adjutant General Count Karl Grünne (in private hands).
    Additional sources include the diaries of Archduchess Sophie (with kind permission of Dr. Otto von Habsburg) and of Prince Karl Khevenhüller (with kind permission of Prince Max von Khevenhüller-Metsch).
    I am also indebted to the estate of the archivist and historian Richard Sexau of Munich for a vast amount of new material. Sexau made detailed and reliable copies of sources in private hands which were unfortunately not available to me in the original. The most valuable among these are the diary of the Emperor’s younger daughter, Archduchess Marie Valerie, and the diary of Elisabeth’s niece, Duchess Amélie von Urach, as well as the extensive correspondence of the Empress’s mother, mother-in-law, and aunts to and from each other.
    Valuable notes on conversations with Countess Marie Festetics, one of Elisabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, were made available to me in the papers of the historian Heinrich Friedjung (State Library, Vienna, Manuscript Division).
    I found several though widely scattered source copies (especially of Elisabeth’s letters to her husband, to her daughter Marie Valerie, and to her mother, Duchess Ludovika) among the papers of Egon Caesar Conte Corti (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna). However, whenever I worked with sources earlier cited by Corti, I made use of the originals. Without exception, my opinion of what passages were worth quoting differed from Corti’s—though I do not mean even by implication to diminish his merits in interpreting primary sources. It is precisely to this renewed perusal of the following original sources that I owe many new insights: diary of Countess Marie Festetics (Széchenyi Library, Budapest); diary of Count Alexander Hübner (Historical Institute of the University of Padua); estate of the Imperial Adjutant General Count Franz Folliot de Crenneville (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna); estate of Landgravine Therese Fürstenberg (Fürstenberg Family Archives, Veitra, with kind permission of Prince and Landgrave Johannes von und zu Fürstenberg).
    Of course I made use of the diplomatic correspondence, insofar as it concerns the Empress, in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna; in the Swiss