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Franz
Josef was born in 1830. At the age of eighteen he became Hapsburg Emperor
and in 1867, ruler of Austria-Hungary. He was emotionally insensitive
and led a life of myopic
devotion to duty and a constant exercise of form and style
that was rnasquerading
a deep sadness.
Franz Joseph
has much to be sad about. On February 18, 1853, he survived an assassination
attempt by Hungarian nationalist János Libényi. His brilliant wife,
Elizabeth (Sissi),
one of
the most beautiful women in Europe, was assassinated
by an anarchist in Geneva (1897). Their first daughter Sophie died as an
infant. His
son,
Crown Prince Rudolf, kept his suicide/death pact with his lover
Baroness Mary Vetsera at the hunting lodge of
Mayerling in 1889.
Following the Rudolf's suicide,
Franz Joseph had many arguments with his nephew and heir, Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, who was assassinated by Serbian nationalists on June 28,.1914 in
Sarajevo. The assassination precipitated a crisis which led to the
outbreak of World War I and the subsequent dissolution of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Although Franz Joseph's deep love for Vienna provided the intellectual, artistic and
social atmosphere that produced Brahms, Mahler, Strauss, Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, Schnitzler, and Freud,
he disliked music, never read
anything,
except government reports, and had no interest in art. He might have
benefited from being psychoanalyzed by Freud for his lack of emotions and
what was almost a sexual fetish for uniforms.
Franz Joseph almost always wore
a uniform, which had a high collar that almost completely enclosed the neck.
It so happened that the collar of his uniform was made out of very sturdy
material. Even though the Emperor was wounded and bleeding from
assassination attempt by
János Libényi, this stiff collar
saved his life. which may in part explain his uniform fetish. He has been portrayed in films by Karlheinz Böhm in the Sissi
trilogy (1955) and James Mason
in Mayerling (1968), and by Christian
Tramitz (voice) in the 2007 animated film Lissi und der wilde Kaiser.
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