Sissi's World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth ed. by Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke (review)

Every visitor to Vienna encounters the face of Empress Elisabeth, known to insiders as "Sissi," emblazoned on souvenir items and museum posters. Yet that famous face is, to borrow Winston Churchill's description of Russia, just the surface of a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The empress and her Sissi persona represent a bundle of contradictions that this volume aims to illuminate from several interdisciplinary angles, including history, art history, literary and film analysis, fashion, queer studies, and cultural studies. The volume investigates how the empress has been commemorated, mythologized, commercialized, and instrumentalized in the service of many different sociopolitical agendas.

Sissi's World opens with the editors' framing of how Empress Elisabeth "has lived on in memory and in myth and has retained her status as a symbol of beauty, grace, elegance, royalty, tragedy, romance, and even kitsch around the world" (1). The historical person Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie von Wittelsbach, born a Bavarian duchess in 1837, who married the Austrian emperor Franz Josef I in 1855 and died at the hands of the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni in 1898, was, by her own choice, a private individual who shunned the spotlight. Still, she has posthumously become an international icon of both the bygone Austro-Hungarian monarchy and its discontents. Many books and films have been devoted to Sissi, most famously Ernst Marischka's 1950s film trilogy starring Romy Schneider, but this is the first collection of essays to try to unpack the ways in which she has been "remembered and imagined, embodied and disembodied, recalled, revered, and constructed" (2). The first half of the volume is dedicated to the memorialization of Empress Elisabeth, in sculptures, museums, paintings, photographs, and films, while the second half considers the mythmaking that surrounds her, in novels, plays, films, parodies, and exhibitions. Each chapter considers a specific incarnation of Sissi in a particular temporal-geographical context that "evok[es] the past in order to capture the Zeitgeist of the present" (5).

Under the rubric of "Memory," Christiane Hertel analyzes the Dreiansichtigkeit (triple perspective) of Ulrike Truger's sculpture Elisabeth—Zwang—flucht—Freiheit (Elisabeth—Constraint—Escape—Freedom, 1989–99), considering how its form and placements reflect on how Elisabeth's life has been interpreted, while Beth Ann Muellner unpacks the intimate, interactive encounters with Elisabeth on offer in the Sisi Museum in the Hofburg. Judith Szapor and András Lénárt reveal how the memory of Sissi has been repeatedly reconstructed in Hungary in response to shifting political frameworks, while Hametz and Borut Klabjan take a similar approach to the memorialization of Sissi in Trieste. Olivia Gruber florek puts the transgressive representative strategies of Winterhalter's 1865 state portrait of the empress in dialogue with Elisabeth's own collection of cartes de visite (visiting cards); Carolin Maikler documents Karl Lagerfeld's creative reworking of images of Elisabeth in photographs and a short film; and Fei-Hsien Wang and Kechin Hsia interrogate the appeal of Romy Schneider's Sissi in post-Mao China, as both a symbol of the non-American West and an effective, if indiscriminate, branding tool.

The second section, "Myth," begins with two essays, by Schlipphacke and Susanne Hochreiter, respectively, that argue convincingly for a queer reading of Sissi, through both the melancholic refutation of Heimatfilm tropes in the Marischka films and the productive role of camp and parody in making sense of Sissi's legacy. Anita McChesney offers an insightful reading of how Lilian Faschinger's novel Wiener Passion (1999; Vienna passion) uses the discrepancies between images of Elisabeth to illuminate the tensions between real and imaginary Viennas. Elizabeth Black explores how Jean Cocteau's 1946 play and 1948 film The Eagle Has Two Heads uses Elisabeth as both inspiration and spectacle. Of particular interest to anglophile readers, Kate Thomas puts Sissi in dialogue with Queen Victoria and Princess Diana...