Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (29 page)

For a woman so seriously concerned with matters of faith and eternity as Dona, the deaths of her unbalanced mother and soldier cousin may have plunged the empress deeper into emotional crisis. So what was the cause of Augusta Victoria’s apparently unbalanced mental state? Often considered the most demure, docile member of her family—both the Holsteins and the Hohenzollerns—her behavior in recent years seemed entirely out of character. When a closer look is given, one realizes that many factors were coming to bear on the empress’s life by this point. In October 1900, she turned forty-two. She began to suffer from a number of the ailments that befell her parents. In spite of these, she insisted on remaining physically active. In summer, she walked, played tennis, and went horseback riding. In winter, she and her sister Louise Sophie ice-skated. Out of love for her husband, she accompanied him as often as she could on as many of his long, hectic foreign trips to places she sometimes hated. She also delivered seven children in ten years, as well as suffering at least two miscarriages, possibly more.

The personal activities, health problems, and frenetic lifestyle account for a certain amount of short-temperedness and irritability in Augusta Victoria; it has never been reported that she suffered from any mental disorder to the same degree as her mother. At most, she is consistently described as having a nervous disposition. This is a highly speculative but vague description. When all the factors are brought to bear, it is most likely that as the empress entered her forties, she was suffering from extended postpartum depression. It is probable that each successive pregnancy and delivery took its toll. These, followed by the miscarriages and Sissy’s birth in 1892, were the ultimate contributing factors. Casual observers assume postpartum depression simply means the new mother is melancholy. In a literal sense, this is something from which Dona never suffered, but her other symptoms are more telling. In their 2008 book
Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Childbirth
, the Boston Women’s Health Collective describes a number of possible symptoms that can be present in postpartum depression, including low self-esteem, sleeping or eating irregularity, an inability to be comforted, exhaustion, withdrawal from social situations, little energy, and being easily frustrated or irritable
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—all of which completely fit with Dona’s personality during this period of her life.

Ultimately, trying to analyze the state of mind of an individual more than a century after the fact is fraught with difficulties. Writing in a similar vein in his semiacademic study of Wilhelm II, author Christopher Clark described the pitfalls this way: “as a means of accounting for behaviour, the psychoanalysis of dead persons is a fascinating but highly speculative exercise. The inherent difficulty of assessing the applicability of diagnostic categories … is compounded by the ambiguous and
sometimes even contradictory character of the sources
[author’s italics].”
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Rather than relying solely on subjective accounts, one must also look at physical evidence. Suffering from postpartum depression or not, Dona’s aforementioned symptoms led to a change in her physical appearance. Her blonde hair turned white. Her once flawless complexion became blotchy and wrinkled. “Poor dear,” said the courtesan Princess Daisy of Pless, “she looks more like the Emperor’s mother than his wife.”
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Even the
New York Times
ran a brief article on Dona’s condition: “From a high court official it is ascertained that Empress Augusta Victoria has greatly aged as of late, her hair being now entirely gray and thin, and her forehead furrowed.”
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Long sensitive about her appearance, she went on a drastic diet in a hurried effort to lose extra weight she thought she had gained.

Her husband made a show of being concerned for his wife’s well-being, but those close to the family suspected his motives were more from the public embarrassment Dona was causing him—at a moment’s notice, she would fly into a wild rage, directing most of her hostility at her husband. “The Kaiserin’s nerves are in a condition which worries me very much,” Wilhelm wrote.
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She accused him of not loving her and instead—and not entirely off the mark—of escaping her as often as possible. When Wilhelm announced he was planning on taking a Mediterranean cruise on a British yacht, she was “
in despair
and begged me to do what I could to prevent the journey,” Wilhelm recalled.
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The insecurity Dona endured in her marriage made her suspicious of the individuals who shared Wilhelm’s attention, his entourage. She even accused him of having a liaison with his closest friend, Count Philip zu Eulenburg (later Prince zu Eulenburg). Although this is almost certainly untrue, Eulenburg was so close to the emperor that Dona’s jealous reaction is not surprising. An older aristocrat—he was fifty-three to Wilhelm’s forty-one—who patiently indulged Wilhelm, Eulenburg gave him something he had lacked his entire life: a loving father figure. Despite the kindliness of Frederick III, Wilhelm had been raised in the shadow of his academician grandfather—Prince Albert—whom both his mother and grandmother treated with reverence approaching apotheosis. As a child, Wilhelm received the same vigorous, constricting education that had worked marvelously on Vicky but backfired on both himself and his uncle the Prince of Wales, who had been forced to attend both Oxford and Cambridge, as well as the Curragh military camp in Ireland. The outcome was that Dona’s husband was a man who desperately craved the approval of his contemporaries, especially older men.

A tense atmosphere entered Dona’s marriage that had not been there before. For the first time, she reproved her husband in public for his decisions. During a trip to the imperial hunting district at Rominten in the autumn of 1900, there were “appalling scenes” between the emperor and empress over the educations of their sons Auwi and Oscar. “The poor dear Kaiserin really seems to be in a bad nervous condition,” Eulenburg reported to Chancellor von Bülow. Eulenburg watched in shock as Dona ran after her husband “like a madwoman” who was screaming and raving so much that the emperor did not know what to do.
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Later, Eulenburg noticed “all night long, the Empress made scenes with her weeping and screaming.” In another conversation, he told Bülow “with feverish agitation that the Empress was in such a nervous state that it would be very advisable if she were separated from the Kaiser soon.”
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Major General von Deines reported similar scenes when he spoke with Dona about her sons’ educations. “I have to deal with a nervously ill woman and an unreasonably anxious mother, who, despite many excellent qualities, hurts as least as much as she helps—strictly from anxiety.”
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Philip Eulenburg resented Dona’s relationship with Wilhelm, feeling it encroached on his personal status as the close friend of the emperor. Some three years after the incident at Rominten, he said that the empress’s “love for His Majesty is like the passion of a cook for her sweetheart who shows signs of cooling off. The method of forcing herself upon him is certainly not the way to keep the beloved’s affection.”
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According to one court observer, Wilhelm “was alarmed that his wife might be suffering from a hereditary disorder which would make it necessary for her to be confined in a sanatorium, a development that would render the dynasty less an object of sympathy than one of enduring shame.” Later, when “he confided his woes to Eulenburg, he advised him to sleep in a separate bedroom and lock the door.”
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By the time winter came, Dona’s battle with postpartum depression seemed to have reached its end. What exactly happened to bring this about remains unclear, but by December, she appeared calmer and less easily agitated. Surviving historical evidence suggests the empress never again suffered from a clinical form of depression as it is recognized today; but for the rest of her life, her behavior would exhibit signs of an anxiety disorder of varying intensity.

As this personal crisis began to wind down for Wilhelm and Augusta Victoria, another royal scandal involving the Austrian imperial dynasty, the Habsburgs, came to the fore. This latest upheaval was caused when Emperor Franz Joseph’s nephew and heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, fell in love with a commoner. The object of his desire was the thirty-two-year-old Countess Sophie Chotek, a lady-in-waiting to the formidable Archduchess Isabella, whose husband, Archduke Frederick, was a senior member of the Austrian imperial family and one of the highest-ranking officers in the Austro-Hungarian military. Sophie, though descended from an aristocratic Bohemian family, was deemed wholly unacceptable to be an empress one day because she did not come from a royal house. In 1899, Franz Ferdinand told the emperor of his determination to make Sophie his wife, regardless of the imperial laws. Franz Joseph refused to consent to the controversial wedding because “by no stretch of the Habsburg family laws or standards could the Choteks be accepted as eligible for marriage into the Imperial house.”
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After a few months, an impatient Franz Ferdinand took matters into his own hands and publicly declared he would marry no one but Sophie. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy nearly cannibalized itself as the imperial court divided into two factions—the traditionalists who were loyal to the emperor and wanted to stop the marriage at all costs, and the progressive liberals who were in favor of the match. With the prospect of permanently damaging the monarchy, and facing pressure from the German emperor, the tsar of Russia, and Pope Leo XIII, the emperor agreed to allow the wedding—but on one condition: it would be morganatic. Sophie could never share her husband’s titles or rank, she could never be empress when he ascended the throne, and any children they might have would be subject to the same restrictions.

The emperor summoned his Crown Council, Privy Council, the Prince-Bishop of Vienna, the Prince-Primate of Hungary, and all the senior members of the imperial family to a special, elaborate ceremony at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna on June 28, 1900. With his hand on the Gospels, Franz Ferdinand swore the “oath of renunciation” on behalf of his wife and future children.
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Three days later, on July 1, Franz Ferdinand married Sophie in a private ceremony at Reichstadt in Bohemia. Neither Franz Joseph nor any other male members of the imperial family were present, including the groom’s brothers. The only members of the dynasty in attendance were Franz Ferdinand’s stepmother, Archduchess Maria Theresa, and her two daughters.

Now that there was no possibility of Franz Ferdinand’s children ever inheriting the throne, attention shifted once again to a new heir: Franz Ferdinand’s younger brother, the dissolute playboy Archduke Otto. The notion that this archduke might one day rule as emperor was relished by no one. A member of the Prussian court remarked that Otto was a man “whom the nations of the dual monarchy, fearful of his possible succession to the throne, include in their daily prayers under the head of ‘Deliver us from all evil.’”
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For all the possible evils Otto could unleash upon Austria-Hungary, he offered the monarchy future security with his two healthy sons, Charles and Max, both of whom were eligible heirs to the throne, untainted by scandal. The boys were raised almost entirely by their pious mother, Archduchess Maria Josepha, the youngest daughter of King George of Saxony. Under his mother’s influence, Charles became respectable and unassuming. He was a boy of only thirteen when his uncle Franz Ferdinand married Sophie. At the time, there was little indication that this adolescent archduke would have a direct hand any time soon in charting the future of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

By the winter of 1900/01, once the dynastic crisis of Franz Ferdinand’s controversial marriage had passed, things seemed to be settling down for Augusta Victoria and the Prussian royal family. They had finally taken up residence at the massive Neues Palais in Potsdam after the Empress Frederick relocated to a new home she had built—Friedrichshof, named for her late husband—near Kronberg, west of Berlin. The Hohenzollerns also began spending more time at the Stadtschloss in Berlin. Located at the end of Unter den Linden, the palace was designed by Andreas Schlüter in the late 1690s before Prussia was even a kingdom (that honor would not come until 1701). With its 650 rooms, the building was massive; the kitchens were nearly a mile away from the dining rooms. At the turn of the twentieth century, it underwent a badly needed, multimillion-dollar renovation. For decades, Prussian castles had been notoriously medieval. Upon moving to Prussia after her marriage in 1857, Dona’s mother-in-law, Vicky, was horrified by the lack of bathrooms, heating systems, or even sufficient lighting.