A Great Trump Escape on Night Trains to Armenia: A Habsburg Suicide

This is the fourth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia — to spend some time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of President-elect Donald Trump. (This week Trump threatened to imprison those from the January 6th Committee who had challenged his supreme being, especially its Republican members, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.)

To get from Heiligenkreuz to the Habsburg fatal corner in Mayerling, I had to ride over the crest of a long hillside between the two towns, but then glided downhill through Marienhof and parts of the Vienna Woods to Rudolph’s hunting lodge, where he ended his life.

As I was approaching it from behind, I wasn’t sure that the large building on my right was the former lodge. I poked around a parking lot wondering where I was but then spotted a modern structure in front of a church and knew that I had found the visitors’ center.

A kind woman at the museum desk allowed me to lock my bicycle to a sign post and she stored my helmet and saddle bag near the cash register.

The visitors’ center is also a Mayerling museum, and there I inspected imperial photographs and letters, including one panel that addressed Rudolph’s barren childhood amid such splendor. It reads:

What the child lacked most was parental love and affection. With his coming of age, Rudolph soon mixed radical and anti-clerical views in his political views; the representatives of the court considered him eccentric: “The young, exalted mind of the Crown Prince, the immaturity of his outlook, the eccentricity of his undeniable intellect have led to fear that he will adopt ideas and tendencies that will not correspond to the conservative nature of a future monarch.” (Chief of Staff Friedrich von Beck-Rzikowsky about the young Crown Prince.

I rented an audio handset and set off on the walking tour around the abbey, which in various chapels and alcoves has many pictures of the doomed couple.

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Mary Vetsera was only seventeen years old when she was lured out to Mayerling and shot in the head so Rudolph would have companionship on his road to eternity.

In the weeks preceding their fatal assignation, Mary had made it clear to Rudolph—at various balls and on carriage rides through the Prater—that she was “available” to the married prince, who was otherwise engaged with other courtesans besides having a wife back at his palace.

Mary was persistent in her infatuation, and she had enabling help in Rudolph’s circle, which secretly transported Mary out to the Mayerling hunting lodge for what they assumed would just be another of his endless trysts.

Mary might well have heard Rudolph talk in sad tones, but until she arrived through a Mayerling back door she had no idea she had signed up for a suicide pact with the crown prince.

Part of the reason why Mary fit in so easily with imperial intrigues is that her parents were well known in the court, and her mother, Hélène Baltazzi (from a rich Greek family), devoted much effort to enabling her attractive daughter to become a royal consort (a role she herself had played in her own youth).

Officially, after her own parents had died, Hélène was married to her legal guardian, Albin Freiherr von Vetsera (ennobled by Franz-Josef), but clearly it was a marriage of convenience, and before Mary was born her mother had actively played the royal fields. Greg King and Penny Wilson write in Twilight of Empire: The Tragedy at Mayerling and the End of the Habsburgs:

More than ten months passed before the couple reunited in the spring of 1871, just before Mary’s birth on March 19. This time frame made it extremely unlikely that Mary was Albin’s daughter. Indeed, when Mary was born her mother allegedly wasn’t entirely sure of her paternity: A diplomat slyly reported that, “in Vienna social circles,” Mary “was nicknamed Le Picnic, because five or six men were regarded as her potential father.”

Among those rumored to have found their way into Hélène’s boudoir was Emperor Franz-Josef, who was known to exercise his droit du seigneur among his vassals, or at least to enjoy a picnic.

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In assessing the various conspiracies around the death of Rudolph and Mary—the Kennedy assassination of Austrian history—King and Wilson weigh these lurid possibilities:

This terrible concern [about Mary’s paternity], runs the speculation, led a frantic Franz Josef finally to confront his son over the affair and confess the dark secret that Mary Vetsera might be his illegitimate daughter. In this case the truth was irrelevant: There was, in 1889, no way to know for sure, but the slightest hint that this was indeed a possibility—that Rudolf might now be involved in an incestuous romance with his half sister—would have threatened the monarchy. If word of this got out—and Franz Josef, knowing Helene Vetsera’s reputation, may well have worried that it would—the scandal would have been immense.

I put the odds on the chances of Mary as Rudolph’s half-sister at no better than one-in-five, but even the suggestion illuminates the incestuous nature of the Austrian court, and it also explains how in the aftermath of Rudolph’s death so many conspiracies were imagined within the halls of the hunting lodge.

Empress Ziti, wife of the last Hapsburg emperor, Karl I, believed that assassins killed the crown prince and his young lover, which might explain why the weapon found in the room did not belong to the prince or why there were more bullets found on the scene that could have been fired in a joint suicide or murder-suicide.

Among those suspected in these murder plots were French intelligence officers (perhaps acting for the Austrian prime minister) or some of Bismarck’s agents-provocateurs.

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Then there was the possibility that evil chamberlains or the jealous husband of a Rudolph lover (too numerous to count) had taken their revenge and made it look like a suicide pact. But none of these theories can explain how Rudolph and Mary were found dead behind a locked door, although what is clear is that Mary died hours before her princely lover (who in between had a bantering meal with some hunting friends in the lodge).

Nor, unless they were forgeries, can the suicide notes of both Rudolph and Mary be easily explained. Mary wrote to her mother: “Forgive me for what I have done. I could not resist my love. In agreement with him I desire to be buried beside him at Alland [a town near Mayerling]. I am happier in death than in life.”

As it turned out, in death Mary would become a non-person. Her body was hastily turned over to some uncles, provided they agreed to bury her anonymously up the road in the Heiligenkreuz communal cemetery, in what was then or since has become known as “suicide corner”.

Most bizarrely, in the carriage that took her over the Marienhof hill, Mary was dressed up in her clothes and wedged between two uncles, so that it could be claimed (if witnesses saw the carriage) that she had left the hunting lodge alive.

Later the court press announced tersely that Mary (according to King and Wilson) “died suddenly while traveling to Venice.” After that, she vanished from the public eye, where previously her flirtations had been the stuff of daily press speculations.

Nothing immediately linked her death to Rudolph, as the emperor’s courtiers did not want to own up to the fact the crown prince had committed either a murder or killed himself (suicide being a cardinal sin in the Catholic church).

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Bereft at the loss of the son who had so troubled him, Franz-Josef chose to cloud his son’s death behind a veil of secrecy. King and Wilson have him saying (it sounds almost Trumpian): “Anything is better than the truth.”

Rudolph was given a state burial in one of the Habsburg crypts and Franz-Ferdinand, one of Franz-Josef’s nephews, took his place as the heir apparent, until he, too, was killed on the eve of World War I in Sarajevo. According to King and Wilson:

Franz Josef could never reconcile himself to the fact that his nephew Franz Ferdinand was now heir and stood in Rudolf’s place. A few days after Mayerling the emperor received his nephew: “I shall never be told officially whether or not I am Heir to the Throne,” Franz Ferdinand complained after the meeting. “It’s as if this stupidity of Mayerling was my fault! I have never been treated so coldly.”

Shame surrounded the death of the crown prince. King and Wilson have this quote from the papal envoy who attended the burial: “My official conscience is clear. I only have to believe what the Foreign Minister tells me. Nevertheless, this is probably the first time in history that a Papal Nuncio will attend the funeral of a murderer and a suicide representing the Pope.” (Clearly immunity did not begin with the Roberts Court.)

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After Rudolph died, the empire began its terminal decline. Franz-Josef remained chained to his desk, hoping that if he signed enough imperial edicts somehow the decaying empire would revive itself.

In her grief Elisabeth wandered Europe as if some Shakespearean ghost until in 1898 an anarchist found her on the quayside along Lake Geneva, and stabbed her with a dagger.

Not even Franz-Ferdinand could escape these deadly hallows. The same courtiers who mistrusted Rudolph’s liberalism, if not his incipient signs of syphilitic insanity, also refused to countenance Franz-Ferdinand’s morganatic marriage to someone they perceived of as a commoner, Countess Sophie Chotek, Duchess of Hoehenberg (but well down the royal tree from the Habsburgs).

Only away from Vienna’s stifling court rituals (on state occasions, Sophie could not eat with her husband; instead, chamberlains would set an empty place for her at the table), could Franz-Ferdinand relax with his wife. It explains why, in June 1914, he took her for their anniversary to Sarajevo, where together they could enjoy the adulations of a grateful subject population—except in this instance those lining parade route in Sarajevo included a handful of Serb assassins.

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I spent about 45 minutes inside the Carmelite monastery and abbey, which at the request of the emperor and empress was built over the footprint of Rudolph’s hunting lodge.

In what would have been the room where Rudolph killed Mary and then took his own life (assuming that’s how it happened), there’s a small altar and what I took to be confession box, and propped next to both of them is a large picture of Emperor Franz-Josef solemnly praying for the lost soul of his son (who, presumably, was condemned to purgatory, according to church doctrines).

Other rooms of the monastery museum contain postmortems outlining various conflicting theories to explain Mary’s and Rudolph’s deaths. Included in the expositions are panels that explain how often since 1899 Mary’s remains have been exhumed so that pathologists and theorists could speculate whether she was shot, poisoned, or bludgeoned to death and whether she might have been pregnant. (Nothing has come from digging up the bones.)

Left out of the display cabinets is the grisly detail that Rudolph’s sister presented their father, the emperor, with two of the bullets from the crime scene. Nor is there any mention that the Crown Prince and his cousin, Countess Marie Larisch, figure into the first verse of T. S. Elliot’s poem “The Wasteland” (“And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s…”).

Larisch was a niece of Empress Elisabeth but, more importantly in this story, she was the go-between for Rudolph and Mary, a betrayal that grieved Elisabeth deeply and caused the countess’s expulsion from the royal family (as Eliot wrote: “Which is not be found in our obituaries…”). Marie was close to her cousin Rudolph and would have known, as King and Wilson write, that:

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….The more theatrical the exit, the more Vienna’s newspapers lingered over the details. Suicide had become entertainment, obsession with death the latest fashion.

Still, she threw the seventeen-year-old Marty Vetsera into his arms, and what’s clear from the family photographs at Mayerling is that until the end Rudolph remained faithful to the latest Viennese fashions.

Who knows, maybe Eliot was writing about Trump’s many hunting lodges when he wrote:

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

At least we know that the word “grope” is the metaphor of choice in the assembling Trump administration.

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