Karen Duve’s new novel about the Austrian Empress: The Sisi Decade

Whe fictional revivals of the former empress of Austria-Hungary, Elisabeth, known as Sisi, have been piling up for almost a year on the basis of a secret sign. New series, new movies, new books, some have already been published, others are still to come, the most recent adaptation is “Sisi” by Karen Duve. Strange, this concerted action, because there is not even a round anniversary that would explain it. It can hardly be Sisi’s 185th birthday on December 24th.

Or is it about the 125th anniversary of her death in September 2023? But then some fictionalizations – such as the sexually explicit “Sisi” from the RTL series with Dominique Devenport, for example – would have come two years too early. And even the death anniversaries of popular historical figures are not celebrated that prematurely. Or is it like the “Luther Decade” that was proclaimed in 2008 and ended in 2017? Are we living in the Sisi decade?

Series, films, novels, reference works, and of course a new cookbook too: Depending on which of these adaptations you take, it seems to fit with the Sisi decade – in the sense of the instagrammability a woman who is said to have been the most beautiful in the world. Who exercised control and power over her image but had a complex relationship with her own celebrity.

The secret sign that many of the new adaptations are based on could also be the hashtag #MeToo – as a synonym for the increased awareness of a society in which women are still forced into roles, reduced to their bodies and prevented from developing and be abused. #MeToo had also led to a review of historical fictional material and classics.

It’s unthinkable to ever stage Sisi like “Sissi” again

To stage Sisi as intimate and cute as she did in the films with Romy Schneider, as an angel of peace and animal-loving wife and mother – that has become unthinkable. The story of the empress, as invented by Ernst Marischka’s trilogy for the post-war generation in need of harmony, was already grossly distorted at the end of the 1950s. Romy Schneider’s own difficult story of emancipation from this glorified “Sisi” role had already told the story.

The writer Karen Duve has now written a novel about the no longer so young Empress Sisi. And her story compiled from historical testimonies, letters, newspaper reports. Above all, Duve used the diary of the lady-in-waiting, Marie Countess Festetics, to form a text from all the material, but you have to get used to the sound of it before you understand the construction principle of “Sisi”. And can tell the different levels of the text apart.

Sometimes you can hear Duve’s narrative voice immediately, for example when she uses it to amusingly moderate scenes from court life. Often, however, the tone changes from movement to movement, from laconicism to that faithful intimacy that Marischka has already used. In this direct confrontation, however, the tone suddenly becomes hollow. What emerges is a distance to the empress, urgently needed in order to be able to see the myth more clearly.

Sisi has actually been yearned for long enough and deeply enough, and not just while she was alive; an adoration and reverence that Duve’s novel celebrates rather than documents. Duve looks at this Sisi with interest, maybe fascinated, but tends to be unmoved. Actually, as the author herself said in an interview, she didn’t want to write a book about the empress, but about horses. And then “Sisi” came out of it.

A novel that is actually often, very, very often about horses. And about riding. In which the rules, procedures and rituals of English foxhunting are described in detail and even the terminology is explained. After reading this book, the specialist vocabulary for equestrian sports and horse-riding may have involuntarily doubled. Do you know what it means, a carriage a la Daumont to drive? (There is no coachman, liveried grooms are seated on the horses on the left.) And you know what liveried grooms are?