The anarchist drove a sharpened file into Sissi's heart

The summer slump can be a dangerous trap for high noble ladies. That's what Diana, Princess of Wales, had to find out on August 31, 1997 in Paris when she was traveling too fast while fleeing paparazzi in Paris and had a fatal accident in her car. 99 years earlier it met an aristocrat who called herself "Countess of Hohenembs". But in her case it wasn't any kind of journalist who was her undoing, but an anarchist. With a sharp file, Luigi Lucheni killed Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary.

However, journalists were also part of the party. A Geneva newspaper had previously reported that the Countess von Hohenembs was none other than the wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I under the pseudonym and also immediately gave her address: the glamorous hotel "Beau Rivage", where the bourgeois ex -Prime Minister of Schleswig-Holstein, Uwe Barschel, was found dead in a bathtub.

On September 10, 1898, around 1 p.m., Elisabeth left the hotel to take the express ship “Genève” to Montreux, accompanied by her lady-in-waiting Irma Sztáray – security personnel had always refused her. On the way to the jetty, a man suddenly jumped out from behind a tree, rushed towards the 60-year-old, hit her in the chest with his hand and ran away. The victim fell to the ground, but was able to get up again with the help of her companion and a coachman and walk the good 50 meters to the ship.

After this had taken off, Elisabeth complained of pains in her chest. "What happened to me now?" were her last words, then she lost consciousness. When Irma Sztáray opened the bodice, she saw a dark red spot at heart level and a small triangular wound. The ship turned and the empress was taken to the hotel, where at 2.40 p.m. only her death could be ascertained. The perpetrator was in custody: passers-by had stopped the fleeing Lucheni and handed him over to the police. A photo shows him smiling between two gendarmes.

Actually, he was after Italy's King Umberto I. However, since he lacked the funds for a trip to Turin, he targeted the French pretender to the throne, Prince Henri Philippe d'Orleans, in order to document his conviction that "if you don't work, you shouldn't eat" with an assassination attempt that attracted the attention of the public. When Lucheni heard of the Empress' presence in Geneva, he changed his aim again.

In the absence of a proper weapon, he stabbed with a pointed, very sharp file. She left a small but 8.5 centimeters deep wound near the heart, from which blood was only slowly leaking. During interrogation, he gave the following as a motive for his act: "Because I'm an anarchist. 'Cause I'm poor Because I love the workers and wish for the death of the rich.” His wish to be extradited to Italy (where the death penalty existed) and where he probably hoped for a posthumous career as a martyr was not granted: in Switzerland that was what it was Life imprisonment sentence. On October 19, 1910, he was found hanged in his cell.

His dream of going down in the anarchist history of terrorism as an “anarchico convintissimo” (most convinced anarchist) has not come true. On the contrary: while his name has long been forgotten, the spectacular act turned the sad Empress of Austria into a mythical figure. The similarities with the Princess of Wales cannot be overlooked, only the dimensions are different.

Because when the 15-year-old duchess in Bavaria from a branch line of the Wittelsbach family married the then 22-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1854, she rose to become the first lady of a great power that stretched from northern Italy to the borders of Russia. She was the beautiful woman at the side of the head of the oldest ruling dynasty in Europe, lived in unimaginable luxury, traveled the world, lived her whims and amassed a huge fortune on the side.

But after the birth of four children, the couple increasingly went their separate ways, especially since the emperor had little time for his wife. Sisi's aversion to the strict Spanish court ceremonies and Viennese society was added to this. In the cold and cheerless atmosphere of the court, Sisi (it was only the films with Romy Schneider that gave her nickname the form "Sissi") withdrew more and more into herself and founded an eccentric cult around her person.

The empress, who is 1.72 meters tall and weighs 50 kilograms, had her hair, which reached to her heels, extensively cared for. This took one to two hours a day. Every 14 days she had her hair washed with a mixture of egg yolk and cognac. She refused make-up and perfume. Out of vanity, she last had her picture taken when she was in her early 30s, and her last painting was at the age of 42. Up until old age she had a wasp waist measuring 50 centimeters in circumference.

The poems in which Elisabeth tried to put her feelings into words in a mixture of diary and memoirs were not published until the 1980s. About her relationship with her husband, she wrote: "Don't be surprised if when doing / according to old patriarchal customs / legitimate marriage duties / an icy cold touch touches you." After all, both spouses treated each other with respect. The Empress even encouraged the relationship that Franz Joseph entered into with the actress Katharina Schratt.

When the emperor was told that Elisabeth had been murdered, he is said to have said to a courtier: "You have no idea how much I loved this woman." , the tool of insane fanaticism aimed at the destruction of the existing social order, has risen up against the noblest of women and, with blind, aimless hatred, struck the heart that knew no hate and beat only for good. "

That was the best of courtly rhetoric. The reality had been different. Often the couple had not seen each other for months because they had stayed at their castles near Budapest or on Corfu, or because their stay had turned dusty places like Meran into hotspots of international society. Her brutal death elevated the beautiful, extravagant and unfortunate woman to an immortal figure of light.

"Depending on the zeitgeist and discretion, the empress was stylized as a fin de siècle femme fragile, a rebellious child of nature, an egocentric beauty icon, a feminist and a esotericist," write the historians Michaela and Karl Vocelka in their Sisi biography. "Or as a depressive being, for whom they even invented their own illness, the 'Sisi Syndrome'." The parallels to Lady Di cannot be overlooked.

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