Mayerling: The Facts Behind The Legend

by Fritz Judtmann, Ewald Osers (Translator)

On the morning of January 30th, 1889, Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, only son of Emperor Francis Joseph I, was found dead in the bedroom of his hunting lodge, Mayerling. Beside him lay the body of the young Baroness Mary Vetsera. Was it a double suicide or was it a murder followed by suicide? The Imperial Court, in an attempt to hush up the threatened scandal, issued such vague information that the confusion of rumors, opinions, and contradictory versions still exists.

After more then five years of intensive research, using at times the methods of the criminologist, Fritz Judtmann has produced a clear and impartial analysis of the mystery. Basing his work on numerous archives in Austria and elsewhere and collecting evidence from descendants and specialists, Judtmann has methodically separated fact and historically unconfirmed matter, and has brought into the investigation some astonishing new material. The extensive findings of his research, now published for the first time in English, make this book a unique and enduring work on the mystery of Mayerling.

Published originally in German under the title "Mayerling ohne Mythos" copyright 1968 Verlag Kremayr & Scheriau, Wien

Genres: Royalty, History, Nonfiction

391 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann]

This is another book I read when I was still in school back in the 1970s and it is now over sixty five years since it was first published. As far as I am aware it is still the best and most comprehensive account of the events at Mayerling and I do not believe that a better account has been published subsequently in any language. Indeed it is appalling the vast number of books since this book's first publication which continued, and still continue, to reproduce the most egregious of the lies, rumours, disinformation, gossip and speculation-as-fact that has attached itself to the rather squalid end of Rudolph and Marie Vetsera. In fact everything squalid in what happened at Mayerling has to do with Rudolph and the coterie of cynical and debauched nonentities who enabled Rudolph to manipulate Marie Vetsera so that he could murder her to ensure he had a companion on his journey into the afterlife. He left behind a scene of a tacky seaside boarding house Sardanapalus but there was nothing that would have attracted Delacroix in Rudolph's demise.

Judtmann effectively demolished the idea of revolutionary plots by Rudolph to reinvigorate the sclerotic Dual Monarchy. Rudolph at the time of his suicide was deserving of Alexander the Great's scorn towards his father when on the eve of invading Persia he said of him:

"Look, gentlemen, at the man who is preparing to cross from Europe to Asia, and who cannot even cross from one table to another without losing his balance..."

The only plots Rudolph was involved in were to lift the soul crushing ennui which consumed Rudolph - the most significant inheritance from his mother the 'Sisi' of a thousand Austrian tourist board t-towels.

Judtmann's book is a fine example of popular history written by a historian. Without going and trawling through the archives yourself you will not find a more readable and comprehensive account of these event and their consequences - one of the most interesting was that it led to pope Pius X in 1904 to issue a new apostolic constitution called Commissum Nobis which abolished the Jus Exclusivae which had up to then allowed catholic monarchs to 'veto' potential candidates for the papacy. Emperor Franz Josef had exercised the Jus Exclusivsae at the 1903 conclave against the much front runner Cardinal Mariano Rampolla because he had refused to co-operate in the Mayerling cover-up by refusing Rudolph a funerary mass. The whole incident makes a mockery of the Vatican's insistence that the Holy Spirit is the only outsider allowed to influence the voters in a conclave.

I apologise for that diversion but I couldn't resist recounting it because so few people, Catholics in particular, know of it. It is an example of the diverse threads of the Mayerling story that Judtmann explores and pins down and which are far more interesting then the speculative nonsense that is all to often repeated ad nauseam about Mayerling.

[Spinster]

I mean if you're going to read a book about Mayerling it might as well be this one. Lots of pictures that are difficult to find online.