



























CEY.Rutherford.FromSelfRefashioningtoStateSymbol


 
 

From Self-Fashioning to State Symbol 
Empress Elisabeth’s Aesthetic Agency, Posthumous Cult, and 
National Appropriation in Austria 

 
Sylvia Rutherford 
University of St Andrews 

 
Abstract 
This thesis interrogates the life and posthumous transformation of Empress Elisabeth of 
Austria (1837-1898), challenging prevailing historiographical constructions that cast 
her as a passive consort constrained by the rigid formalities of the Habsburg court. 
Through an analysis of visual culture, gendered self-representation, and the processes of 
cultural mythologisation that followed her death, Elisabeth emerges as a figure who 
strategically cultivated a public persona that exercised aesthetic and performative 
agency in subversion of the symbolic constraints of her imperial role. After her 
assassination, however, this carefully constructed image was appropriated and 
reconfigured within Austrian cultural memory, as her acts of self-fashioning were 
systematically effaced and supplanted by a romanticised iconography that functioned as 
an ideological projection screen for the reconstruction of national identity in twentieth 
century Austria. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Article 
 
Introduction 
 

Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, occupies a paradoxical 
position in Austrian cultural memory: resolutely elusive in life, yet inescapably 
omnipresent in death. Born into the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty, she married 
Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1854 and ascended to the ceremonial apex of the Habsburg 
monarchy.1 Her imperial career is widely perceived as defined by withdrawal, aesthetic 
extremity, and personal tragedy – most notably the suicide of her only son, Crown Prince 
Rudolf.2 Yet this perception, shaped less by her imperial career than her posthumous 
image, obscures the complexity of her historical presence. Following her 1898 
assassination, Elisabeth became an object of obsessive cultural fascination, centred on 
her mythologised beauty. Appropriated by mass media and popular culture, she was 
transfigured into an icon of romantic tragedy and abstracted into a symbol of idealised 
femininity.3 This thesis intervenes in such narratives by reasserting Elisabeth as an 
agent of aesthetic self-fashioning who resisted the constraints of dynastic femininity. 
Tracing the processes of her posthumous mythologisation, it exposes how gendered 
iconography overwrote her self-fashioned image, effacing her agency and recasting her 
as a passive emblem of imperial femininity. 

The historiographical scope of this study is defined by its engagement with 
English-language scholarship, facilitating an interrogation of Elisabeth’s legacy within 
anglophone discourse. Central to this discourse is the image of Elisabeth as a tragic 
figure constrained by the ceremonial strictures of Habsburg identity – an image rooted 
in biographical accounts published posthumously. Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen 
inaugurated this tradition in 1899, portraying Elisabeth as “tormented by the oppressive 
sense of injustice which made her life a long martyrdom.”4 The same year,  Alborough De 
Burgh entrenched this portrayal, framing the death of her son as the rupture that 
transformed Elisabeth into a spectral presence, “haunted…seeking in vain for rest.”5 
Clara Tschudi’s 1900 biography advanced the “sorrowing mother” motif, casting 
Elisabeth as the tragic embodiment of the irreconcilable tensions between dynastic 
obligation and desire for independence.6 These early works established the “Mater 
Dolorosa” paradigm that shaped Elisabeth’s cultural reception. Egon Corti’s 1936 
biography attempted a historiographical correction, denouncing the tradition of 
“romantic embellishment” and seeking to reclaim Elisabeth “from the realms of legend.”7 
Yet, nostalgic undertones and Corti’s neglect of her contemporary reputation limited 
this endeavour.  

7 Egon Corti, Elizabeth: Empress of Austria, trans. Catherine Alison Phillips (Yale University Press, 1936), v-vi. 

6 Clara Tschudi, Elisabeth: Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, trans. E. M. Cope (E. P. Dutton & Co., 
1901), 253.  

5 Alborough De Burgh, Elizabeth Empress of Austria: A Memoir (Hutchinson & Co., 1899), 16-17. 
4 Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen, The Martyrdom Of An Empress (Harper & Brothers, 1899), 4.  

3 Matteo Tuveri, “Elisabeth of Austria: A Beauvoirian Perspective,” Simone de Beauvoir Studies 24, no. 1 
(2008): 5, https://doi.org/10.1163/25897616-02401004. 

2 Katrin Unterreiner, Sisi: Myth and Truth, trans. Neil Radford (Verlag Christian Brandstätter, 2005), 85.  

1 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, “Gender, Imperialism, and the Encounter with Islam: Ruth Beckermann’s Film A 
Fleeting Passage to the Orient,” in Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle, ed. Gail 
Finner (Indiana University Press, 2006), 191.  

42 
 

https://doi.org/10.1163/25897616-02401004


 
 

A decisive shift occurred in 1981 with Brigitte Hamman’s landmark study. 
Enduring as the most comprehensive and methodologically sophisticated biography to 
date, Hamann reinterpreted Elisabeth as an ideologically-engaged figure who actively 
resisted the performative expectations of her role. Hamman’s assertion that the true 
“tragedy of her life” stemmed from the fact that “self-realisation did not make her 
happy” challenged the prevailing perception of the empress as a passive victim.8 In 
Hamann’s wake, a wave of scholarship sought to recover Elisabeth from the margins of 
Habsburg history. The resultant body of work foregrounded her political influence, 
particularly her role in the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867.9 Her affinity for 
Hungary inspired extensive study on her symbolic significance within that context. 
Comparatively, studies examining Elisabeth’s cult within Austria remain largely absent. 
This lacuna is striking given the dramatic revaluation of her image that followed her 
assassination. Regarded with marked ambivalence during her lifetime, Elisabeth was 
recast postmortem as a figure of national veneration. That an empress of Bavarian 
origin, who articulated limited identification with Austria, would be reconfigured as a 
symbolic locus of national identity demands further scrutiny.  

This historiographical imbalance is redressed through a gendered perspective, 
first substantively treated in Maura Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke’s 2018 edited 
volume. Reframing Elisabeth’s transcultural resonance, they argue that successive 
reincarnations of her image constitute not an enduring historical legacy but a mutable 
cultural artefact, whose feminine appeal is repeatedly repurposed to legitimise the 
cultural imaginaries of the present.10 The work of Olivia Gruber Florek offers a 
particularly significant contribution. Through engagement with visual analysis, Florek 
broadened the scope to recognise Elisabeth’s cultural function, arguing for the centrality 
of visual culture in the production of femininity. Her 2022 monograph, the first 
concentrated study of Elisabeth’s portraiture, uncovered the extent of Elisabeth’s 
curatorial control.11 While Florek focuses on Elisabeth’s influence on modern female 
portraiture, her analysis critically illuminates Elisabeth’s assertion of agency within a 
representational realm typically inaccessible to women.12 This thesis takes Florek’s 
methodology as a point of departure, shifting the analytic focus to the posthumous 
reframing of Elisabeth within Austrian cultural memory.  

Traditional scholarly treatment of the visual culture surrounding Elisabeth, 
which constitutes the primary source base of this study, has interpreted these materials 
within the reductive framework of her posthumous mythology, thereby obscuring her 
agency in self-representation. Repositioned within the context of their creation, these 
sources reveal Elisabeth’s strategic negotiation of the visual codes of imperial femininity. 
The framework underpinning this analysis is informed by Judith Butler’s theory of 
gender as performative, constituted through the “contingent construction of meaning.”13 
Butler’s model provides a critical lens for interpreting visual enactments of imperial 

13 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2007), 190. 
12 Ibid., 7. 

11 Olivia Gruber Florek, The Celebrity Monarch: Empress Elisabeth and the Modern Female Portrait 
(University of Delaware Press, 2022), 13.  

10 Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke, “‘Sissi’: The Convergence of Memory and Myth,” in Sissi’s World, 
ed. Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 5.  

9 Unterreiner, Sisi, 48. 

8 Brigitte Hamann, The Reluctant Empress: A Biography of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, trans. Ruth Hein 
(Faber and Faber Ltd, 2010), vii. 

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majesty as articulations of dynastic legitimacy. To examine Elisabeth’s performance of 
this role, this study engages Pamela Robertson’s “feminist camp” theory – an aesthetic 
defined by “oppositional modes of performance and reception” – which elucidates how 
stylised femininity could be reappropriated as resistance to hegemonic gender norms.14 
Within this framework, Elisabeth’s mobilisation of visual codes of femininity emerges as 
a considered subversion of monarchical gendered performance. This interdisciplinary 
methodology, fusing visual analysis with gender theory, is anchored throughout by 
reference to Hamann’s biography.  

This thesis proceeds in three sections. The first explores Elisabeth’s 
self-representation during her lifetime, arguing that she strategically employed aesthetic 
and performative tactics to subvert monarchical expectations. The second traces the 
posthumous transformation of this image, as it was reshaped to align with gender ideals 
in twentieth-century Austria. The final section examines the instrumentalization of 
Elisabeth’s image within Austria’s Second Republic, interrogating its role in the 
reconstruction of national identity. Through a gendered analysis of visual culture and 
cultural memory, this study reveals how Elisabeth was appropriated as a symbolic 
projection screen for the configuration of Austria’s cultural and political identity.  

Self-Fashioning 
 

In the visual economy of nineteenth-century monarchy, image operated as a 
crucial medium through which authority, legitimacy, and identity were constructed and 
conveyed. Female consorts were bound by an unwritten but immutable script of 
dynastic performance, in which fertility functioned as a fundamental aspect of visible 
governance, anchored in the production of a male heir.15 A long-standing tradition of 
Habsburg imagery celebrating imperial motherhood inscribed this ideal. Elisabeth, 
however, appeared in only a single photograph with her children during her reign.16 
Moreover, she refused to sit for photographs beyond the age of thirty.17 While her retreat 
from the public eye has traditionally been read as evidence of her victimhood, closer 
analysis of her visual statements reveals her awareness of female consort imagery as a 
codified performance grounded in gendered expectations – one she actively worked to 
control.18 Drawing on Butler’s model of gender as an “intentional and performative” act, 
Elisabeth’s use of feminine aesthetics emerges as a self-conscious performance, 
preserved through her calculated withdrawal.19 This performance sees Elisabeth engage 
in what Robertson terms “feminist camp practices.”20 By reappropriating aesthetic codes 
of femininity, Elisabeth reclaimed aestheticism as a means to dictate her public 

20 Robertson, Guilty Pleasures, 9. 
19 Butler, Gender Trouble, 190. 

18 Beth Muellner, “The Empress Elisabeth of Austria and Her ‘Untidy’ Collection,” Women’s Studies 39, no. 6 
(2010): 551, https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2010.490734. 

17 Sylvia Schraut, “Sissi: Popular Representations of an Empress,” in Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 
20th Centuries: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices, ed. Sylvia Paletschek (Berghahn Books, 2010), 158.  

16 Florek, Celebrity Monarch, 14. 

15 Joseph Roach, “Private and Public Stages,” in Enlightened Princesses: Caroline Augusta, Charlotte, and the 
Shaping of the Modern World, ed. Joanna Marschner et al. (Yale University Press, 2017), 166.  

14 Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Duke University Press, 
1996), 9. 

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identity.21 As such, she emerges as a conscious agent of self-fashioning who manipulated 
the representational schema of imperial femininity.  

The image Elisabeth intended to preserve is encapsulated in a trio of portraits by 
Franz Xaver Winterhalter, the last officially commissioned portrayals of the empress.22 
Winterhalter, celebrated for his success in conveying the archetype of female 
monarchical representation, began his residency at the Viennese court in autumn 
1864.23 The resultant portraits, however, refuse to conform to the dominant canon of 
consort imagery. The most overt example is the formal portrait (Figure 1) that served as 
Elisabeth’s official image, to complement Winterhalter’s portrait of the emperor.24 The 
dissemination of these portraits intended to glorify the emperor through visual 
splendour and, importantly, reinforce his patriarchal authority.25 As Mary Sheriff has 
observed, the symbolic power of the female consort lay in her subordinate relationship 
to the emperor, precipitating the forfeiture of control over her body and its 
representation.26 In light of this, it is striking that Elisabeth appears without the 
heraldry typical of imperial portraiture. Her white tulle gown, by Parisian couturier 
Charles Worth, evokes the image of a “queen of the ball” rather than a Habsburg 
empress.27 Worth’s renowned creations drew on elements of theatrical costume that ran 
counter to traditional aristocratic silhouettes.28 In a further appeal to theatrical 
representation, Elisabeth’s hair is adorned with diamond stars reminiscent of Viennese 
costume jewellery. By substituting imperial regalia for emblems of modern glamour, 
Elisabeth distanced herself from the responsibilities of her ceremonial role. Such 
distinct iconographic departures signal an unusual degree of intersubjectivity in the 
portrait’s production.29 Her appeal to theatrical portraiture enabled her to circumvent 
stylistic conventions and assert an individuality traditionally denied to female consorts. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

29 Florek, Celebrity Monarch, 7.  

28 Abigail Joseph, “‘A Wizard of Skills and Tulle’: Charles Worth and the Queer Origins of Culture,” Victorian 
Studies 56, no. 2 (2014): 257, https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.56.2.251. 

27 Juliane Vogel, “The Double Skin: Imperial Fashion in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Body of the Queen: 
Gender and Rule in the Courtly World, 1500-2000, ed. Regina Schulte (Berghahn Books, 2006), 227. 

26 Mary D. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (University 
of Chicago, 1996), 154.  

25 Olivia Gruber Florek, “Empress Elisabeth and the Painting of Modern Life,” in Sissi’s World, ed. Hametz and 
Schlipphacke, 137. 

24 Richard Ormond and Carol Blackett-Ord, eds., Franz Xaver Winterhalter and the Courts of Europe 1830-70 
(National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1987), 217.  

23 Florek, Celebrity Monarch, 32. 

22 Titia Hensel, “‘Secret Pictures’? Staging Privacy in Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s Portraits of Female 
Monarchs,” in Empresses and Queens in the Courtly Public Sphere from the 17th to the 20th Century, ed. Marion 
Romberg (Brill 2021), 206. 

21 Ibid., 34. 

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The individuality Elisabeth achieved through unconventional aesthetic 
expression is enhanced when her portrait is viewed in tandem with that of Franz Joseph. 
In contrast to Elisabeth, the emperor employs the typical imperial accoutrement that 
affirm his status.30 Despite this, Elisabeth’s commanding presence, emphasised by the 
expanse of her gown, dominates the composition. The emperor’s gaze mirrors, and 
encourages, a visual trajectory leading to the body of the empress. While Franz Joseph 
looks at Elisabeth, she stares directly at the viewer.31 Her posture obstructs the 
emperor’s view of her figure, denying him access to her body and, thus, undermining its 
prescribed function as a vessel for the future dynasty. The paradoxical subjectivity of 
Elisabeth’s expression is telling: while her eye contact reveals awareness of the viewer’s 
gaze, the barriers to her body and her implied movement into the recessional landscape 
convey control over her objectification.32 Her image is thus preserved in a moment of 
evanescent presence that destabilises the authority of the emperor.33 Viewed through 
the framework of gender performativity, Elisabeth’s refusal to conform to iconographic 

33 Vogel, “Double Skin,” 227.  
32 Florek, “Elisabeth,” 148-9. 
31 Ibid., 34.  
30 Ibid., 32-4.  

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tradition demonstrates her awareness of the power inherent in subverting conventional 
tropes of female consort portraiture. By transcending reliance on the symbolic capital of 
her status, Elisabeth enacted a vision of authoritative femininity detached from the 
representational role demanded of an empress. 

Winterhalter’s two additional portraits depict the empress in a strikingly 
informal setting. The first of these is an oval-shaped canvas (Figure 2) that captures 
Elisabeth in an apparent moment of intimacy.34 Commissioned personally by Franz 
Joseph, it has traditionally been relegated to the private sphere. This classification, 
however, obscures the portrait’s public function through its display in the emperor’s 
Hofburg office.35 Demonstrating that the image was well-known to contemporaries, 
Franz Joseph’s 1898 biographer noted, “when the emperor raises his gaze, he looks 
straight ahead into the wonderful face of the Empress, whose famous portrait by 
Winterhalter stands on an easel.”36 As such, the portrait’s visibility invites analysis of its 
utility as a tool through which Elisabeth constructed her public image.  
 

 
 

36 Max Herzig, Viribus Unitis: Das Buch vom Kaiser (Verlag von Max Herzig, 1898): 10, qtd. in Titia Hensel, 
“Secret Pictures,” 208. 

35 Hensel, “Secret Pictures,” 208-9.  
34 Florek, Celebrity Monarch, 71.  

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Here, her modes of self-representation discard the elaborate costuming of the 
state portrait and she appears authentically unadorned. Although such compositions 
were not without precedent in Winterhalter’s repertoire – in 1843 he produced a 
portrait of Queen Victoria with unbound hair as a gift for Prince Albert –  Elisabeth’s 
differs markedly in affect.37 Whereas Victoria gazes passively away from the viewer, 
Elisabeth maintains direct eye contact and the scale of her hair dominates the scene.38 
Interlaced at her chest, her ostensibly un-styled hair obscures access to the sexual 
elements of her body; her neck, her breasts, and her figure are usurped by her hair.39 As 
a result, Elisabeth evades the passivity of contemporary female portraiture and wields 
her hair as a barrier to her body. This is achieved through deployment of the “female 
masquerade,” which, as advanced by Robertson, deliberately reproduces cultural 
stereotypes, simulating femininity based on an awareness of “the activity of gendering 
as an enactment.”40 For Elisabeth, the masquerade is deployed as a strategy of 
opposition to patriarchal patterns of representation. In this example, she appeals to the 
convention of hair as a symbol of naturalized femininity yet implements it in such a way 
that she retains authority over her sexual body. 

Biographical evidence for Elisabeth’s hair rituals informs the argument for her 
authority in positioning her hair as the dominant visual motif. It is well-documented 
that Elisabeth developed rigid beauty routines, and Hamann details that “the daily 
regimen of hair care could not be accomplished in much less than three hours.”41 
Elisabeth’s Greek instructor, Konstantin Christomanos, describes this regimen as a 
“sacred ritual.”42 The value Elisabeth placed on preserving the beauty of her hair 
extended to almost all aspects of her appearance and her devotion to this so-called “cult 
of beauty” is traditionally interpreted as a manifestation of vanity. Karen Owens 
embodies this in attributing Elisabeth’s “obsessive concentration on her beauty” to her 
persistent attempt to gain recognition as “the most beautiful woman in the world.”43 Her 
subversive use of aesthetics in the Winterhalter portraits, however, complicates such a 
reductive reading of these practices. As she manipulated her femininity as a currency of 
power, Elisabeth demonstrated her engagement with beauty as a tool to renegotiate 
gendered frameworks of representation. Thus, her commitment to preserving this 
beauty emerges as an effort to withstand the co-option of her body by her role as 
empress. 

Elisabeth’s construction of her public identity emerges as an articulation of her 
private identity, or sense of self, revealed through her collection of carte-de-visite 
albums. In the nineteenth century, women across Europe engaged in album production, 
a practice that intensified after A. E. Disderi patented the carte-de-visite in 1854. As 
Anne Higonnet has illuminated, assembling these albums offered women “a means both 

43 Karen Owens, Franz Joseph and Elisabeth: The Last Great Monarchs of Austria-Hungary (McFarland & Co., 
2014), 112-5.  

42 Konstantin Christomanos, Tagebuchblätter (Mortiz Perles, 1899): 58., qtd. in Hamann, Reluctant Empress, 
136. 

41 Hamann, Reluctant Empress, 133. 
40 Robertson, Guilty Pleasures, 12. 
39 Florek, “Slave To My Hair,” 9.  
38 Florek, Celebrity Monarch, 76.  

37 Olivia Gruber Florek, “‘I Am A Slave To My Hair’: Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Fetishism, and 
Nineteenth-Century Austrian Sexuality,” Modern Austrian Literature 42, no. 2 (2009): 7, 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24649766. 

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to learn and perform an identity.”44 Shaped by individual understandings of femininity, 
the nature of album curation uncovers “women’s definition of themselves as it was 
structured by gender conventions.”45 Evidence for Elisabeth’s engagement in this trend 
exists in the form of eighteen albums personally assembled by the empress.46 Three of 
these, known as the ‘Albums of Beauty’, exclusively contain images of women and stand 
out as representational of Elisabeth’s disengagement from the methods of collecting 
adhered to by her contemporaries.47 The traditional approach to these albums focuses 
on the individual photographs and, consequently, overlooks the complexity that emerges 
through addressing their place in the wider collection. This method obscures Elisabeth’s 
curatorial role and endorses the popular perception of her albums as evidence for her 
superficial obsession with beauty. To appreciate them as a site for Elisabeth’s 
construction of identity, it is essential to heed Higonnet’s reminder that “each individual 
picture works toward the meaning of the album as a whole.”48 Through the Albums of 
Beauty, compiled in the years preceding Winterhalter’s residence, Elisabeth’s collecting 
is illuminated as an act through which she developed her sense of self that was then 
publicly disseminated through portraiture.  

Elisabeth’s album curation aligned with her absence from the Viennese court in 
the early 1860s. It was from Venice, in March 1862, that she penned her request to her 
brother-in-law, Archduke Ludwig Viktor, for photographs, “only of women.”49 This 
request was then extended to foreign diplomats and Elisabeth’s only criteria was “pretty 
faces,” irrespective of social status.50 In disregarding delineations of social class and 
selecting women who occupied the public sphere, Elisabeth utilised her albums to 
construct a vision of femininity that operated outside the realm of domesticity.51 In one 
instance, Elisabeth placed an image of Empress Eugénie amongst erotic photographs of 
Parisian performers that would have been regarded as pornographic by 
contemporaries.52 Hamann concludes that the Parisian consulate’s submission of these 
“scandalous” photographs was intended as a gesture of “mockery.”53 Elisabeth, however, 
juxtaposed these images with the French empress to dissolve the established hierarchy 
between the worlds of monarchy and theatre.54 Further, the sexuality of both these 
subject categories was inherent in the role they were expected to perform. While the 
sexuality of the Parisian dancers was available, and intended, for public consumption, 
that of Eugénie manifested in her dynastic reproductive obligation. By grouping these 
images together, Elisabeth symbolised the tension between the presumed modesty of 
imperial consorts and the public expectation of reproduction.55  

55 Ibid., 47.  
54 Florek, Celebrity Monarch, 43.  
53 Hamann, Reluctant Empress, 130.  
52 Ibid., 47.  
51 Florek, Celebrity Monarch, 42.  
50 Ibid.  
49 Corti, Elizabeth, 104.  
48 Higonnet, “Secluded Visions,” 177. 
47 Florek, Celebrity Monarch, 42.  

46 Uwe Schögle. “‘Now I am Collecting Photographs’: Miriam Szwast in conversation with Katrin Unterreiner 
about Elisabeth of Austria’s carte-de-visite collection,” Photoresearcher 36 (2021): 5, ESHPh. 

45 Ibid., 171.  

44 Anne Higonnet, “Secluded Visions: Images of Feminine Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in The 
Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude (Routledge, 1992), 179.  

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This awareness of the performative nature of her role extended to 
representations of “normative” models of beauty. She included, for example, a 
photograph of Archduchess Sophie posing with an album beside a photograph of an 
anonymous bourgeois woman, smiling while viewing an album. While Sophie looks 
anxiously towards the camera, the unidentified woman is absorbed in the album, 
conveying a sense of ease and confidence.56 In this self-reflexive compilation, Elisabeth 
explores the act of spectatorship. While her duties as empress posited her as an object 
of public spectacle, she was also an astute spectator and demonstrably aware of the art 
of self-staging in the performance of her monarchical image.57 Through the visual 
language of these albums, Elisabeth interrogated the role of women in the public realm 
and fashioned her individual identity against gender conventions before embracing this 
identity to fashion a public image detached from her role as imperial wife and mother. 

The ‘Sissi’ Myth 
 

Elisabeth’s intellectual agency in shaping her self-representation has been largely 
occluded by the mythologising narratives generated through posthumous 
reappropriations of her image. These reconstructions diverged markedly from the 
discourse perpetuated within Austria during her lifetime, where her failure to fulfil the 
prescribed public role of empress provoked disillusion and resentment.58 Citing health 
concerns as justification for her absence, Elisabeth elicited little sympathy amongst the 
Viennese aristocracy. In the early 1860s, Archduchess Therese remarked, “I feel 
infinitely sorry for [Francis Joseph] for having a wife who prefers to leave her husband 
and her children for six months instead of leading a quiet life in Vienna.”59 Within the 
Viennese court, Elisabeth was regarded as a consummate failure in both her imperial 
duties and her duties as a wife and mother. Among the wider population, Elisabeth 
became a veritable stranger over the course of her life.60 Given that strict Habsburg 
censorship suppressed overtly critical voices, the empress was virtually ignored by the 
press, especially in her later years. On her fiftieth birthday in 1887, Die Neue Freie Presse 
devoted a mere seven lines to the occasion and, a decade later, mention of her sixtieth 
birthday was limited to the observation that she spent it in Paris.61 The subsequent 
transformation of public opinion appeared to forget not only the criticism of her 
character but her active defiance of Habsburg expectations.62  

The tragedy of Elisabeth’s death provided fertile ground for the reconstruction of 
her image in line with established gender ideals. Her violent assassination instigated her 
dramatic return to the public stage and proved a pivotal moment in the construction of 
her posthumous myth.63 Austrian media coverage ubiquitously emphasised her 
outstanding beauty, compounded with the tragedy of her death, to style the empress as a 

63 Kendler, “Sisi,” 163. 
62 Unterreiner, Sisi, 106. 

61 Susanne Hochreiter, “Sissi: A Double Reflection on a ‘Queer Icon’,” in Sissi’s World, ed. Hametz and 
Schlipphacke, 160. 

60 Kendler, ‘Sisi,” 162. 

59 Papers of Archduke Albrecht, Hungarian State Archives, Budapest, quoted from the microfilm in Haus-, Hof- 
und Staatsarchiv, Vienna, November 4, 1860, reel 32, qtd. in Brigitte Hamann, Reluctant Empress, 100. 

58 Maria Kendler, “Sisi: A Figure of Multiple Projections,” in Cultural Complexes in Europe, ed. Jörg Rasche 
and Thomas Singer (Routledge, 2025), 162.  

57 Ibid., 550.  
56 Muellner, “Elisabeth,” 549.  

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“Mater Dolorosa.”64 The trope of motherliness as a system of reference in memory politic 
provided a tool to implant women into memory culture by assigning them national and 
social importance.65 Elisabeth’s unjust death as an act of self-sacrifice enhanced the 
symbolic power of this image. In an appeal to the familiar figure of the Virgin Mary, 
Elisabeth came to allegorise the beautiful, suffering mother.66 This sentimental 
reimagining offered the public a figure of ideal femininity and motherhood as a site of 
collective identification.67 In death, therefore, Elisabeth emerged as an idolized figure 
whose image was appropriated to reaffirm defined notions of feminine beauty in 
Austrian cultural discourse.68 Her loss of agency over her portrayal facilitated the 
projection of a romanticised image that suffused the narrative of her reign in line with 
the Habsburg court’s desire to enforce a positive association between the empress and 
the empire. As a symbolic surrogate, the empress now fulfilled her dynastic function as 
the allegorical representation of hegemonic imperial power.69 In crafting a 
commemorative narrative that “obfuscated Elisabeth’s problematic behaviour,” the 
monarchy effectively replaced the provocative empress with a “compliant duplicate.”70  

Immediately after her death, Elisabeth’s body was assimilated into the ritual of 
iconographic public ceremony that she had avoided during her lifetime.  Upon its arrival 
in Vienna on September 15, her coffin was placed on display in the Hofburg’s Palace 
Chapel until the funeral procession on September 17 delivered the empress to the 
Church for burial.71 These public displays invoked expressions of collective mourning 
and re-focused the empress as a symbol of state unity.72 Media coverage reinforced the 
visual language, as in an excerpt from New Freie Presse that reads, “We are one people 
and one family…in this widespread and ethnically rich monarchy, hardly a heart beats 
now that is not in accord, in grief and compassion, with the so terribly stricken 
monarch.”73 Focusing on nationalistic loss, personified by the suffering of the emperor, 
memorial passages espoused the image of Elisabeth as Landesmutter.74 This narrative 
aligned with the paternalistic interpretations of Habsburg rule that had long acted as a 
centrifugal force for the image of the dynasty.75 Coinciding with Franz Joseph’s Golden 
Jubilee, the ceremony surrounding Elisabeth’s death was conducive to creating a 

75 Scott O. Moore, “Vaterland, Heimat, and the Family of Nations: Education and Identity Formation in Late 
Habsburg Austria,” Nationalities Papers, Special Issue (2015): 9, https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2024.100.  

74 Nighswander, “Seeing Sisi,” 8-9. 
73 Neues Wiener Tagblatt (Vienna), September 11, 1898, qtd. in Nighswander, “Seeing Sisi,” 8.  
72 Ibid., 207.  

71 Daniel Louis Unowsky, “The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 
1848-1916” (PhD Thesis, Columbia University, 2000), 208. 

70 Olivia Gruber Florek, “The Absent Empress: Photomontage, Monarchy, and Celebrity in the Nineteenth 
Century,” in Representing the Habsburg-Lorraine Dynasty in Music, Visual Media, and Architecture, 
1618-1918, ed. Werner Telesko (Böhlau Verlag, 2017), 92. 

69 Hochreiter, “Sissi,” 261. 

68 Anita McChesney, “Imagining Austria: Myths of ‘Sisi’ and National Identity in Lilian Faschinger’s Wiener 
Passion,” in Sissi’s World, ed. Hametz and Schlipphacke, 284. 

67 Regina Schulte, “The Queen – A Middle Class Tragedy: The Writing of History and the Creation of Myths in 
Nineteenth-Century France and Germany,” Gender & History 14, no. 2 (2002): 284, 
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.00266. 

66 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester University Press, 
1992), 67.  

65 Sylvia Paletschek and Sylvia Schraut, “Introduction: Gender and Memory Culture in Europe – female 
representations in historical perspective,” in The Gender of Memory: Cultures of Remembrance in Nineteenth- 
and Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Sylvia Paletschek (Campus Verlag, 2008), 24. 

64 Lena Nighswander, “Seeing Sisi: Contemporary Portrayals of Empress Elisabeth of Austria on Page and 
Screen” (MA Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2004), 12.  

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genuine feeling of identification with the emperor and, therefore, the intensification of 
dynastic unity.76 Alongside the image of Elisabeth as Landesmutter, Franz Joseph 
embodied the loving father who would serve as a palliative for the suffering of the 
Austrian people.77 After her death, therefore, Elisabeth as the virtuous empress served 
as an integrating symbol, inserted into the paternalistic narrative of Habsburg rule to 
bolster affinity with the monarchy in Austrian national consciousness.  

The legend attached to the image of Elisabeth inaugurated by the rhetorical 
interventions of the Habsburg court gained renewed vitality in the 1950s with the 
release of the sensationally successful Sissi film trilogy. Directed by Ernst Marischka and 
produced by Vienna-based Erma-Film, the series charted Elisabeth’s life up to the 
1860s.78 Caitlin Gura has credited the trilogy with igniting a European-wide “Sissi 
phenomenon,” driven by their romanticised portrayal of the “fairy tale” empress.79 This 
cinematic rendition of Elisabeth, as Sissi, is inseparable from the cultural context of 
postwar Austria, specifically the crisis of traditional gender order. The period between 
1945, when Austria suffered political and military defeat with the fall of the Third Reich, 
and 1955, when Austria regained national independence, proved formative for the 
reconstruction of gender roles.80 An atmosphere of masculine insecurity accompanied 
economic and social shifts post-1945 that saw many men experience a loss of social 
status, while women had comparatively enhanced their position.81 The need to provide 
stability through positive gender role models based on distinctly Austrian ideals thus 
grappled with the destabilisation of traditional gender order. Popular cinema provided 
an avenue to promote a revived image of masculinity while simultaneously reinforcing 
traditional gender relations.82 Within this context, the character of Sissi acted as a foil 
for the reconstruction of gender relations in Austrian society.  

The audience is introduced to Sissi in the Bavarian countryside at Possenhofen, 
her family home, when she enters the frame riding a horse.83 This idyllic portrayal 
situates Sissi as the embodiment of innocence and natural virtue that persists 
throughout the narrative. These values are established as key moral stabilisers in the 
initial dialogue, when Sissi’s father advises her, “Whenever sorrow and trouble enter 
your life, open your eyes and take a walk…and every flower will remind you of the 

83 Heidi Schlipphacke, “Melancholy Empress: Queering Empire in Ernst Marischka’s Sissi Films,” in Sissi’s 
World, ed. Hametz and Schlipphacke, 224 

82 Ibid., 86. 
81 Ibid., 87. 

80 Maria Fritsche, “Austrian Men ‘Do Everything with Feeling!’: Representations of Masculinity in Post-War 
Austrian Cinema (1946-1955),” in Continued Violence and Troublesome Pasts: Post-War Europe Between the 
Victors After the Second World War, ed. Ville Kivimäki and Petri Karonen (Finnish Literature Society, 2017), 
86.  

79 Caitlin Gura, “The Austrian Aschenputtel: Empress Elisabeth of Austria as an Icon of Austrian National 
Identity,” Trinity College Digital Repository, Trinity Papers (2013): 7, 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.38593922. 

78 Erica Carter, “Sissi the Terrible: Melodrama, Victimhood, and Imperial Nostalgia in the Sissi Trilogy,” in 
Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering, ed. Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman (Boydell and Brewer, 
2010), 81. 

77 Christian Wolf, “Representing Constitutional Monarchy in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century 
Britain, Germany, and Austria,” in The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State 
Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy, ed. Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky (Berghahn Books, 
2007), 213.  

76 James Shedel, “Emperor, Church, and People: Religion and Dynastic Loyalty during the Golden Jubilee of 
Franz Joseph,” The Catholic Historical Review 76, no. 1 (1990): 129, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25023203. 

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almighty power of God, and you will find solace and strength.”84 Sissi repeats this homily 
verbatim in her initial romantic encounter with Franz. The relationship between Franz 
and Sissi is set up as a highly romanticised love story, beginning with a chance 
encounter at Bad Ischl, where Sissi has travelled for the intended betrothal of her sister 
and the emperor. Not recognising Sissi, Franz is enraptured by the beauty of this 
“ordinary” girl.85 Set against the backdrop of nature, the circumstance of their meeting 
serves to authenticate their love in contrast to the matchmaking orchestrated by their 
mothers.86 Subsequently, Franz declares his love for Sissi during a private conversation. 
Responding to her initial rebuttal of his proposal, Franz laments the burdens of his 
position and confides that “I don’t know if it is a joy to be married to me.”87 This 
admission marks the last occasion where Franz readily admits weakness.88 With Sissi on 
his side, Franz’s masculinity is revitalised and he is empowered to firmly rebuke his 
mother in the following scene.89 The moral influence of Sissi, therefore, is a rejuvenating 
force that inspires the emperor’s victory over the undue influence of the Archduchess.90 
In this narrative Sissi actuates the remodelling of Franz’s masculinity that, while 
grounded in traditional patriarchal relations, is tempered by the gentle authenticity 
associated with femininity that Sissi exhibits.  

The conflict between Sissi and the Archduchess frames the central narrative of 
the second instalment, Sissi: The Young Empress. Following the birth of Sissi’s first child, 
a protracted power struggle ensues when the Archduchess insists on taking charge of 
the infant.91 Sissi, positioned as the protective mother, engages in a furious defence of 
the mother-child dynamic and reacts against the domineering authority of the 
Archduchess by fleeing to Possenhofen.92 At her parental home, extended scenes of 
familial intimacy recast Sissi’s rebellious “masculine” nature in the feminine form as a 
longing for mother-child symbiosis.93 Sissi’s ultimate return to Vienna, and her 
reconciliation with the imperial court, facilitates the mediation of political tensions 
between the Austrian monarchy and Hungarian nationalists through her charm and 
empathetic disposition, positioned as redemptive forces. The film thus concludes with 
the coronation of Sissi and Franz as King and Queen of Hungary.94 The resolution of this 
dual conflict, both personal and political, is achieved not through statecraft, but through 
Sissi’s feminine virtues of motherliness and affective sincerity.95  

This message is strongly reaffirmed in the culminating sequence of the final film, 
which unfolds in the politically volatile atmosphere of Venice.96 In the face of the Italians’ 
burgeoning nationalist rebellion, Franz calls on his wife for succour and Sissi, debilitated 

96 Schlipphacke, “Melancholy Empress,” 218.  
95 Schraut, “Sissi,” 167. 
94 Schlipphacke, “Melancholy Empress,” 218.  
93 Ibid. 
92 Carter, “Sissi,” 97. 
91 Schlipphacke, “Melancholy Empress,” 218. 
90 Ibid., 80. 
89 Ibid.  
88 Ibid. 

87 Maria Fritsche, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema: Nationhood, Genre and Masculinity (Berghahn 
Books, 2013), 83. 

86 Sabine Müller, “‘Finally a Human Being in this Palace’: How ‘Sissi’ Deals with the Past,” New Readings 9 
(2008): 5, https://doi.org/10.18573/newreadings.63. 

85 Schlipphacke, “Melancholy Empress,” 231. 
84 Carter, “Sissi,” 84.  

53 
 



 
 

by illness, joins her husband for the imperial procession.97 A pivotal moment occurs 
when Sissi is reunited with her daughter, forgoing etiquette and embracing her in her 
arms. The previously hostile crowd erupts in a cheer of “Viva la mamma!” at this display 
of maternal sentiment.98 Here, Sissi’s maternal appeal, rather than her imperial status, 
becomes the conduit through which dissent is neutralised and the imperial image 
rehabilitated.99 The films’ consistent recourse to the domestic sphere as the site of 
resolution has important connotations for Austrian gender relations in the postwar 
period. The influence of Sissi’s naturalness and authenticity, imbued with symbolic 
maternal power, effectively dissolves the energy of rumbling political rebellion against 
the imperial regime.100 Yet, these reconciliations are contingent upon Sissi’s acceptance 
of her roles as empress and wife; thus, personal and political harmony is only achieved 
through the re-inscription of patriarchal gender codes.101 In this configuration, 
Elisabeth’s cinematic representation mobilises her image to stabilise postwar Austrian 
identity through a nostalgic invocation of hegemonic gender norms. These portrayals 
stand in direct contradiction to the image Elisabeth actively cultivated and worked to 
preserve during her lifetime, underscoring the extent to which her posthumous legacy 
was shaped by external ideological imperatives rather than her own self-fashioned 
identity.  

State Symbol 
 

The figure of Elisabeth in the Sissi trilogy performed a critical ideological function 
in the construction of Austrian national identity in the wake of World War II. The war’s 
denouement precipitated a crisis of national identity when, as Franz Mathis has 
identified, “Austria experienced something which seems so vital for the creation of 
national identity, but which the country had never experienced before: the liberation 
from a suppressive regime that it had finally learned to hate.”102 Austria faced the task of 
conceptualising itself as a modern nation with an identity distinct from that of Germany. 
Intimately connected with the quest for a new national identity on political grounds was 
the quest for a unique cultural identity.103 This ideological project derived significant 
rhetorical impetus from the Allies’ 1943 Moscow Declaration.104 The Declaration defined 
Austria as “the first free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression.”105 Selective 
appropriation of its wording propagated the so-called “victim-doctrine,” which became 
the hegemonic narrative in the construction of a collective Austrian identity.106 
Returning to full sovereignty as a neutral republic with the signing of the State Treaty in 

106 Martin Tschiggerl, “Significant Otherness Nation-building and Identity in Postwar Austria,” Nations and 
Nationalism 27 (2021): 783, https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12677. 

105 “The Moscow Conference; October 1943,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, 
Yale Law School, accessed April 25, 2025, 
https://web.archive.org/web/20230402080630/https:/avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/moscow.asp#expand.  

104 Christian Karner, “The ‘Habsburg Dilemma’ Today: Competing Discourses of National Identity in 
Contemporary Austria,” National Identities 7, no. 4 (2005): 417, https://doi.org/10.1080/14608940500334382. 

103 Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, “Beyond ‘The Sound of Music’: The Quest for Cultural Identity in Modern 
Austria,” The German Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2003): 289, https://doi.org/10.2307/3252083. 

102 Franz Mathis, “1000 Years of Austria and Austrian Identity: Founding Myths,” in Austrian History Memory 
& National Identity, ed. Günter Bischof and Anton Pelinka (Routledge, 1997), 23.  

101 Müller, “Finally a Human Being,” 10. 
100 Cater, “Sissi,” 99.  
99 Ibid. 
98 Schraut, “Sissi,” 167. 
97 Carter, “Sissi,” 97. 

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1955, Austria sought to evade association with the controversial legacy of its immediate 
past by invoking a unique, non-German, cultural patrimony.107 Consequently, the Second 
Republic was symbolically, and ideologically, configured as the successor of the 
Habsburg neo-absolutist monarchy.108 In reactivating this imperial legacy, Austria’s film 
industry came to the fore.   

Austrian cinema’s most efficacious genre in the 1950s was the Kaiserfilm, an 
Austrian variant of the German Heimatfilm tradition. The ideologically charged 
Kaiserfilm emphasised Austria’s historical grandeur through the prism of Habsburg 
imperial splendour, projecting a vision of a culturally coherent Austria rooted in a 
glorified imperial past. Marischka’s Sissi trilogy, released in the same year as the signing 
of the State Treaty, is often heralded as the apotheosis of this genre.109 Sissi combines the 
opulence of Habsburg Austria with bucolic alpine landscapes, allowing audiences to 
vicariously inhabit the benevolent word of a bygone Austrian utopia.110 Through 
charting the story of Elisabeth as the Bavarian Princess and young empress, Marischka 
succeeded in constructing a “fairy tale.”111 However, the explanatory notion of “nostalgic 
escapism” risks obscuring the trilogy’s ideological function in shaping postwar Austrian 
identity.112 Throughout, Sissi provides a reference for a modern Austria anchored in 
traditional cultural values.113 Her simplicity and affinity with nature are staged as 
humane and democratic traits, implicitly contrasting with the ossified Habsburg 
court.114  

Establishing the ideological binary, the first film intercuts scenes of Sissi in the 
Bavarian Alps with Viennese court scenes depicting Franz Joseph burdened by 
responsibility. In one such scene, when asked to approve death sentences for young 
Prague dissidents, the emperor replies, “you cannot expect me to make a snap decision 
on the lives of eight young people.”115 Establishing visual association with the pastoral 
world of the benevolent Sissi signals that the emperor will decide in favour of 
leniency.116 Because of Sissi’s influence, the generational conflict with the authoritarian 
Archduchess is repeatedly resolved in favour of the young protagonists. In a pivotal 
confrontation between Sissi and her future mother-in-law, Sissi declares: “I have no 
intention of changing my way of living. I want to life free, without constraint.”117 Here, 
Sissi espouses the tenets of the new Republic of Austria as her character is equated with 
truth, freedom, and democracy. It is the advent of these ideals that is expressed in the 
visual organisation of the finale, when Sissi makes her journey down the Danube to 
marry Franz Joseph.118 Initially, Sissi is framed from behind, aligning the audience with 
her view of the castles and churches lining the riverbanks. Alternating shots reverse this 

118 Ibid. 
117 Wauchope, “Sissi,” 175. 
116 Ibid. 
115 Cater, “Sissi,” 85. 
114 Ibid., 175.  
113 Wauchope, “Sissi,” 173.  
112 Müller, “Finally a Human Being,” 2-3. 

111 Mike Peters et al. “Empire and Romance: Movie-Induced Tourism and the Case of the Sissi Movies,” 
Tourism Recreation Research 36 no. 2 (2011):170, https://doi.org/10.1080/02508281.2011.11081317. 

110 Mary Wauchope, “Sissi Revisited,” in Literature, Film, and the Culture Industry in Contemporary Austria, 
ed. Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger (Peter Lang, 2002), 173. 

109 Gura, “Aschenputtel,” 9. 
108 Tschiggerl, “Otherness,” 790.  
107 Robert von Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema: A History (McFarland & Co., 2005), 158. 

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perspective to offer the gaze of the cheering Austrian populace. This visual interplay 
constructs a dialogic rapport that fuses the iconography of Habsburg grandeur with the 
democratic ethos of postwar renewal, and Sissi is framed as the rightful representative 
of the Austrian people.119 As a symbol of leadership and authenticity, Sissi embodies a 
renewed image of Austria that provides the means to generate a new notion of national 
identity. 

Marischka’s use of masquerade scenes in the following films empowers the 
fashioning of Sissi as a figure of identification for the postwar generation of Austrians. 
The overemphasised splendour of the imperial court is simplified in comparison to 
panoramic scenes of the countryside, which praise the beauty of nature as the paradise 
that Sissi longs for. This is exemplified in the second film, when Franz travels to 
Possenhofen to retrieve Sissi after she has fled the Hofburg. Rather than returning 
directly to Vienna, the imperial couple detours through southern Austria. While hiking 
through the mountains of Tyrol, an impending storm sees the couple seek refuge in a 
local chalet. Masquerading as ordinary Austrians, Franz struggles to decipher the dialect 
of their host, prompting Sissi to tease him for “not understanding his own people.”120 
Sissi’s confidence and comfort in this simple, rural environment is reinforced when she 
expresses her wish that they were “no longer the Emperor and Empress, but people of 
the mountains.”121 In such instances, the pageantry of Habsburg royalty is 
backgrounded, and Sissi and Franz are positively reduced to the status of ordinary 
Austrians.122 The fantasy of this pastoral idyll functions as a defence against traces of 
turmoil and loss in the Austrian imagination, such that the temporal space of the pure 
rural community could be imagined as a potential future.123 Sissi becomes the ideal 
historical figure to articulate this postwar iteration of national identity, and, as a result, 
the cinematic character emerges as a cultural icon, transforming the empress into a 
contemporary heroine – an Austrian Aschenputtel.124 In an image divorced from 
historical reality, Elisabeth was thus co-opted as an allegory for 1950s Austria who did 
not merely reflect but actively contributed to shaping the identity of the new Austrian 
Republic.  

The conflation of Elisabeth with Austrian identity that began in the decade 
following the Second World War was reanimated in the 1990s. The catalyst for this 
resurgence was the so-called “Waldheim Affair,” which coincided with the fiftieth 
anniversary of the Anschluss and sparked political debate over Austria’s level of 
involvement in the Third Reich, challenging Austria’s “victim status.”125 In 1986, Kurt 
Waldheim, former UN Secretary General and Austrian President, was accused of 
personal involvement in the Nazi occupation of the Balkans.126 Contemporary 
commentators alleged that Walheim’s historical “amnesia” was paradigmatic of wider 
Austrian reluctance to confront its past, which engendered a heated transnational 
debate concerning Austrian complicity in the pan-European aggression of Hitler’s 

126 Ibid., 908.  

125 Lutz Musner, “Vienna – Urban Memories and the Reification of Culture,” Human Affairs 12, no. 2 (2002): 
122, https://doi.org/10.1515/humaff-2002-120203. 

124 Ibid. 
123 Carter, “Sissi,” 90. 
122 Ibid., 12. 
121 Ibid. 
120 Gura, “Aschenputtel,” 11. 
119 Müller, “Finally a Human Being,” 10. 

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regime.127 Austria’s carefully constructed modern identity was thus destabilised, forcing 
Austria to mediate between determining its role in the European community while 
confronting its Third Reich past.128 Once again, the figure of Elisabeth provided a means 
to resurrect the image of Austria as a neutral state with a rich history.129 In its revived 
form, the idealised image of Sissi as a cultural icon was sensationalised to construct the 
image of Elisabeth as a royal celebrity.  

Austrian cultural and tourist institutions commercialised this renewed image of 
Elisabeth to promote a popular and unproblematic vision of Austria for domestic and 
international audiences.130 It should not be overlooked that the proliferation of the 
empress’s image in tourism campaigns performed an important function as discursive 
terrain for the negotiation of issues of Austrian identity.131 In Vienna, in particular, 
Elisabeth was intimately tied to Habsburg landmarks, encouraging tourists to engage 
nostalgically with the Habsburg past through the romantic figure of the empress.132 
Indeed, the “Sissi ticket” offered a package for tourists to experience Vienna exclusively 
through exhibits centred on the empress. As well as viscerally experiencing Elisabeth’s 
life through a shared location, tourists could purchase her image on innumerable 
souvenir objects.133 The immortalised image of Elisabeth on such objects as plates, fans, 
and bells, ascribed a domesticity unto the empress that misrepresented her reality to 
serve the needs of contemporary society.134 Heidi Schlipphacke identifies Viennese 
marketing of “Habsburg nostalgia” as constituting more than a reactionary retreat into 
the past. Rather, it generates “nostalgic affective responses that are radically displaced 
from the location and time of Habsburg Vienna,” enabling the empress to become a 
pliable signifier of cultural stability.135 As in the 1950s, the sensationalised figure of 
Elisabeth was mobilised to connect an irrecoverable imperial past with the cultural 
present, while deflecting contemporary issues of Austrian identity.136  

The centenary of Elisabeth’s death in 1998, officially commemorated as the “Sissi 
Year”, marked a climax in this promotional campaign, generating an estimated 
equivalent of fifty-million German marks in tourist and consumer expenditure.137 
Numerous features and facilities were launched in her honour, such as the “Walking 
Tours of the Empress” that enabled participants to retrace her footsteps to Baden and 
the Vienna Forest.138 The Winterhalter portraits, encountered at the beginning of this 
study, were ubiquitously reproduced on banners and postcards, amongst other forms of 

138 Oliver Haid, “‘Eternally Will Austria Stand…’: Imperial Tourism in Austria Between Timeless Predisposition 
and Political Statement,” in Royal Tourism: Excursions around Monarchy, ed. Philip Long and Nicola J. Palmer 
(Multilingual Matters & Channel View Publications, 2008), 117. 

137 Wauchope, “Sisi,” 179. 
136 Ibid. 

135 Heidi Schlipphacke, “The Temporalities of Habsburg Nostalgia,” Journal of Austrian Studies 47, no. 2 
(2014): 14, https://doi.org/10.1353/oas.2014.0023. 

134 Beth Muellner, “The Remains of the Stay: The Corporeal Archive of Empress Elisabeth in the Hofburg,” in 
Sissi’s World, ed. Hametz and Schlipphacke, 75. 

133 Ibid., 358 

132 Susanne Kelley, “Sisi in the Museum: Exhibits in Vienna and the US,” in Sissi’s World, ed. Hametz and 
Schlipphacke, 357. 

131 Gundolf Graml, Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present (Berghahn 
Books, 2020), 2. 

130 Ibid., 178. 
129 Ibid. 
128 Wauchope, “Sissi,” 177. 
127 Karner, “‘Habsburg Dilemma’,” 414. 

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visual media, often accompanied by the caption “Eternal Beauty.”139 In this context, her 
state portrait projected the former opulence of the Habsburg monarchy, while the 
informal portrait provided evidence of Elisabeth’s status as the epitome of timeless 
feminine beauty.140 It is precisely this dissemination of her image, stripped of its 
historical specificity, that occludes Elisabeth’s agency in constructing her self-image 
through the processes of commodification and nostalgia. Thus, the image of Elisabeth 
emerged as a palimpsestic memory site within Austrian cultural imagination, one whose 
symbolism consistently overrode historical veracity. Idealised in the 1950s through the 
Sissi trilogy as the youthful embodiment of a rehabilitated Austrian Republic, and later 
reimagined in the 1990s through sensationalist mythmaking, her image functioned not 
as an index of lived history but as a symbolic vehicle for the negotiation of national 
identity and commodified nostalgia. 

Conclusion 
 

The paradox at the heart of Empress Elisabeth’s cultural legacy lies in the 
disjunction between her strategic manipulation of her image in life and the ideological 
instrumentalization of that image after her death. In defiance of the dynastic codes that 
prescribed imperial femininity as maternal visibility and ceremonial compliance, 
Elisabeth fashioned an aesthetic persona that eluded such prescriptions. Her visual 
self-fashioning, rooted in calculated absence, aesthetic extremity, and the mobilisation of 
beauty, exploited and subverted the very codes it inhabited. Refusing to be reduced to a 
reproductive cipher within the visual economy of monarchy, she enacted a form of 
feminine resistance that was at once deeply embedded in and critically distanced from 
the imperial stage.  

Yet in death, Elisabeth transformed into a cultural palimpsest: a figure 
retroactively inscribed with qualities that reinforced conservative gender ideals and 
national mythologies. The Habsburg imaginary reconfigured her into an icon of serene 
maternity and imperial loyalty, an ideological construct at odds with the historical 
record. Through the twentieth century, the qualities projected onto Elisabeth were 
repeatedly mapped onto Austria itself, as her image became a symbolic linchpin in the 
mythologisation of imperial nostalgia. In her reimagined form, Elisabeth no longer 
resisted the visual regime – she became its posthumous muse.  

  

 

 

 

 

140 Florek, “Elisabeth,” 131. 

139 Jeffrey L. Sammons, “Previewing Sisi: A Congratulatory Album on the Marriage of Emperor Joseph and 
Elisabeth of Bavaria,” The Yale University Library Gazette 74, no. 3/4 (2000): 135, 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40859233. 

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