László Márton
Countess Hohenembs Turns Her Back
or
Farewell to the Century
I wish to talk about the relationship that binds a (Hungarian) writer living at the turn of this century to an (Austro-Hungarian) empress assassinated at the turn of the last, one who was the Queen of Hungary, into the bargain, but above all, who was insistently herself.
I had a dream about her the other day, I dreamt that she was locked inside a bottle, like the genie in A Thousand and One Nights, Yes, I think I could start off like this. Except this was not a dream, but a slice of reality, a dismal and ludicrous part of reality as unworthy of her as it is inseparable from her. Be that as it may, I must start with the bottle.
I went up to the National Library in Buda Castle one afternoon, in order to check up on some information for this article. On the way, I couldn't help stopping in front of a shop window at the foot of Castle Hill. There she was, in the window, or to be exact, it wasn't her, but a famous portrait of her painted by Winterhalter, what's more it was a part of that portrait, fossilized into a sort of emblem, or icon, depicting a lovely young woman's head with a diamond diadem in dozens of copies. The shop in whose window she was thus pilloried happened to be a confectioner's, and the bottles which bore the flattering portrait of her lovely face on their label held a cream liqueur called "Sissy".
If I want to avoid insincerity and speaking in generalities, I must first speak of this millenary cream liqueur, as well as Romy Schneider's equestrian prowess on the big screen. I am not primarily interested in why and to what extent the figure of Elizabeth has been turned into kitsch by popular culture (after all, what in the 19th century was fossilized into an emblem is bound to become syrupy kitsch in the 20th); rather, I would like to ponder whether in our age, which is the spiritual and material heap of ruins of previous ages, Elizabeth's fate as an individual and as a queen and empress can still be retrieved and understood. Beyond the stylization of her person, beyond the heated Eros, can we still grasp something of the meeting-point between the personality (though solitary and isolated) and the age as a whole (though on the verge of collapse and disintegration)? In short, if we ignore the clichés and the kitschy fantasies, can we come any closer to Elizabeth, herself the heroine of keeping one's distance?
[...[
Anyone who in 1952 might have looked down from the shelled-out Castle to the other side of the Danube did not really see any such splendid view. At first sight, this has nothing to do with Elizabeth but something to do with me. In 1872, when Jókai day-dreamed about how, eighty years later, the Magyarized ruler of the Danube Monarchy (under Hungarian hegemony) would protect (naturally, relying on the Hungarians) Central and Western Europe from the Russians in a world war that would then break out, barely five years had passed since the Austro-Hungarian Compromise and just one year since the Franco-Prussian War; the Monarchy appeared to be the guardian of stability in Europe, and Hungarians experienced the euphoria of political consolidation and economic boom, and they loved their King. (They did not love the Emperor, albeit he was one in person with the King.) What's more, they chiefly loved the King because he was the Queen's husband, and the whole nation was one in adoring the Queen.
At that time the Queen was thirty-five and beautiful. The hero of the novel, Árpád the Second, the Habsburg ruler who had become Hungarian, and who (need we add) was brought up a Hungarian by "the most august royal mother", was the offspring of this self-same (Platonic) love.
Of course, this takes us no closer to her than the long, shabby street on the Pest side of the river on the outskirts of town which is lined with drab, grey houses, and which is named after her, and where the trolley, given the number 70 in honour of the occasion of Stalin's seventieth birthday, took its passengers all the way from Kossuth Square. This long street is called Queen Elizabeth Road. I must have been around five when it was explained to me that the street was named after her because "she was good to the Hungarians", and because "she had been murdered". I had no doubt in my mind that she was killed because she was fighting for freedom; after all, around that time - this being the sixties - I was taught that "throughout its entire history, the Hungarian people fought for freedom." Of course, what freedom was was not really clear but around that time that question did not arise, at least not in me.
Still, my first impressions - at least those I can recall - link the concept (or sound?) of freedom to the name of Elizabeth. The year when I first spelled out Elizabeth's name on the No 70 trolley they opened the rebuilt Elizabeth Bridge, which had been blown up twenty years before. When I first saw the bridge, it was still blood-red (because of the lead oxide, they explained), but a few weeks later, it was white. Only its name had not changed. It did not suffer the fate of Francis Joseph Bridge to the south, which the dictatorship had right at the start rechristened Liberty Bridge. Later I also learned that the northern neighbour of the Elizabeth Bridge was the Chain Bridge, and the bridges of Budapest shaped themselves into a full exegesis of the world. Chain on the right, Liberty on the left, Elizabeth in the middle. What's more, there's another bridge to the left of Liberty, the Petõfi, named after Petõfi, the poet of liberty. Sándor Petõfi (1823-1849), before he was cut down in flight by the Cossacks, wrote a number of poems about all chains having to be broken, and that he was ready to sacrifice Love for Liberty, and yet he was ready to sacrifice his very life for Love. He also urged his readers to hang all kings. He said nothing about hanging queens; that possibility had probably never occurred to him.
I spent an appreciable part of my boyhood on the No 70 trolley. It stopped in front of our house. The wall of our house was a dirty grey and spattered with bullet marks, it was decades after the war, and not quite one decade after the suppressed revolution. The quarter where I spent my boyhood, the seventh district (Elizabeth Town) was built in the last years of the nineteenth century, quickly, and with a sense of purpose, in the months when Christomanos wrote his diary. The city was meant to be a metropolis, the impressive, well-ordered capital of a self-confident country (or at any rate, one that was noisily concealing its lack of confidence.) I began to become familiar with what, for want of a better word, we call Life barely seventy years later, in the shot up and crumbling Socialist Realist "headquarters" of a Russian satellite. The No 70 trolley transported me in around thirty minutes from the 5th district and the square named after Lajos Kossuth, who had been the most adamant enemy of the Habsburg dynasty, to the 16th district, and Queen Elizabeth, who was the wife of the Emperor Francis Joseph. It started at Kossuth Lajos Square, rambled along the street named after Emeric Kálmán, from whose operettas both Romy Schneider and the cream liqueur emerged; it crossed Andrássy Avenue, I shall have a thing or two to say later about the man who lent the avenue his name, and which at the time was called People's Republic Avenue; then the trolley turned into Mayakovsky Street and crossed Lenin Boulevard, neither needing an introduction, proceeded along Damjanich Street, named after a rebellious Honvéd general executed in 1849, crossed Dózsa György Road, named after a rebellious peasant leader executed in 1514, passed the empty spot where once had stood the Stalin statue toppled during the 1956 Revolution, and finally reached Queen Elizabeth. In those days, the revolution was called a counter-revolution; Count Gyula Andrássy, with whom Queen Elizabeth was in love, was called People's Republic, and the Emperor Francis Joseph, who was the husband of Queen Elizabeth, was called Liberty.
As I have said, all of this congealed into a solid and compact world-view. I, for one, did not realize how much rebellion, insurrection and revolt was involved, how much fighting for freedom, and all of it condemned from the start, whereas I was taught that the world I lived in epitomized the idea of Liberty come true. I noticed neither the complete chaos of values nor their complete historical determination, which is related to precalculated forgetfulness in the same way as the Hungarian battles for freedom are related to their precalculated failure. Just as I only woke up as an adult to the odd fact that it is customary to call the monarch the Emperor Francis Joseph and his spouse Queen Elizabeth.
[...]
I imagined Queen Elizabeth as a giant who had so much blood in her that it could cover an entire bridge. I imagined some sort of serpent-like creature, because her nickname, Sissy, reminded me of the hissing of a snake; indeed, her slim, black figure has something of the winged serpents of Antiquity in it. I often heard this nickname later, though I cannot be sure that she would have approved of such familiarity in her subjects and their descendants. I imagined that she got her nickname of Sissy because she was related to Sisyphus. In the photographs of her later days, her tightly closed lips suggest something of the relentless effort involved in rolling a rock uphill.
Elizabeth came to Hungary for the last time in 1896, in honour of the Millen-nial. The country feverishly and spectacularly celebrated the thousandth anni-versary of the Magyar "conquest"; Prince Árpád's turul bird gyrated over the Carpathian Basin once again, and wherever he touched ground he turned into bronze. Ever since, turul birds are thick on the ground all over the country, that did not just celebrate a thousand years of existence, but the fact that although it should have vanished four hundred years earlier, it was still going strong, apparently booming, with a bright future, and yet total collapse could barely be postponed, and not for long. elizabeth, wearing black, and all alone, was barely noticed, if for no other reason, because the emblematic presence of the presiding genius of the nation obstructed public awareness of her real person. By this time, Elizabeth had been living for years in the world recorded in the diaries of Christo-manos. I can see no passage between the two worlds, that of the shield of Hun-gary, and Böcklin's dream-world, and I have no design to link or coalesce these two female figures, the beautiful Queen active in politics and the solitary wanderer, Countess Hohenembs. Countess Hohenembs is about to take her leave from Hungary, for ever; she turns her back on the gaping crowds of the nineteenth-century Millennial celebrations and we, in the last years of the twentieth century, can finally take our leave from the twentieth century with that same gesture.
László Márton
is a novelist, essayist and translator, who wrote this as an introduction to a forthcoming German edition of the journals of Konstantin Christomanos, who was Queen Elizabeth's teacher of Greek and accompanied her to Greece on more than one occasion. The name Countess Hohenembs was not a pseudonym but one of the titles the Queen used when travelling abroad.
