AUSTRIA: Vintage of ’89

Since 1889 the standard European feature story has been “The Mystery of Mayerling,” uncorked two or three times a year by practically every newspaperman from the Baltic to the Bosporus. Its fascination for Continental readers can only be grasped by Anglo-Saxons in terms of a married Prince of Wales found with his head smashed in by a champagne bottle at his hunting lodge while dead of poison on the bed lay Mrs. So-&-So with a bullet through her head. If so baffling a discovery were to be sipped and savored for 46 years in the British and U. S. press, and if then the widow should produce a letter written by her husband just before the double tragedy, the sensation in English-speaking countries might equal what it was in German-speaking lands last week when off Vienna presses rolled the memoirs of Her Imperial Highness Stephanie, only to be confiscated before nightfall by the Austrian Government. The Imperial Austrian Government in 1889 and all its successors thus continue even now to build up by censorship “The Mystery of Mayerling.” Forty-six years ago Stephanie was Crown Princess of Austria-Hungary. The Mrs. So-&-So of her husband Archduke Rudolf was the young and flighty Baroness Maria Vetsera. Bratfisch, the enigmatic “favorite coachman” of the Crown Prince, was waiting when for the last time she slipped away from her parents and was driven by Bratfisch to the walled and gloomy hunting lodge of Mayerling.

Today Stephanie is the wife of Hungarian Prince Lonyay. She has her pearls and her limousine. That she should attempt to publish her memoirs so incensed her daughter by Rudolf, the Princess Elizabeth Windisch-Graetz,* that last week she publicly protested: “Tact, piety and religious professions, of which my mother is always talking, should have prevented her from such an act!”

“Was the Archduke Rudolf a suicide?” has been the crux of the mystery of Mayerling. Stephanie in her suppressed memoirs offers as proof that he was a suicide this letter, photostatically reproduced and apparently in the handwriting of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Dual Crown:

Dear Stephanie:

Now that you are freed of the trouble of my presence, be happy in your own way. Be good to our poor children, who are all that is left of me. Give my last greetings to all our friends.

I die quietly, as death alone can save my good name.

Embracing you affectionately, I am your loving Rudolf.

Why death alone could save the good name of the Crown Prince can now be done into feature articles for decades, since that is a mystery to which Stephanie cannot have the last word. Rudolf’s widow cannot disclose in so many words that his amours were with persons of both sexes and that there was presumably a man with a strong right arm to wield the champagne bottle in “The Mystery of Mayerling.” But Stephanie writes in her memoirs as realistically as a sentimental, 71-year-old princess & perfect lady can:

“All my efforts to save him were vain because the Crown Prince was devoid of every feeling for family life. In consequence of many experiences which from his earliest age he had had with women, he despised women. He was capable of affection and was extremely loyal to his men friends, but despised women as something less than his equals in birth.

“He never loved Maria Vetsera. She was only one of many for him. But she loved him truly, and I am glad to be able to say this although I was the deceived wife, and lay it as a tribute on the coffin of the unhappy girl.”

A high reason of state which caused the Austrian Government of 1935 to decree suppression last week: the Government is strongly Restorationist and Stephanie’s revelations concerning her Habsburg Crown Prince are considered most injurious to the popularity in Austria of the Habsburg Pretender Otto whom the Government wishes to restore as Emperor.

*An anxious galaxy of Hungarian statesmen are now trying to persuade another aristocrat, Prince Ludwig Windisch-Graetz, not to publish his memoirs. In ancient and authentic lineage the House of Windisch-Graetz equals the Imperial House of Habsburg. But to write memoirs putting Mayerling in the shade and provoking Hungarian political upheavals, Prince Ludwig need only go back to 1925 and tell how with the assistance of the Budapest Chief of Police, the connivance of the Premier of Hungary and the co-operation of experts of the Hungarian State Cartographical Institute, he set about counterfeiting 30 billion French francs to disorganize the currency of France (TIME, Jan. 18, 1926).