Viennese Waltz

By Mayo Mohs

THE EAGLES DIE: FRANZ JOSEPH, ELISABETH, AND THEIR AUSTRIA by GEORGE R. MAREK 532 pages. Harper & Row. $12.50.

Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire for 68 years, succumbing at last at age 86, two years after the start of World War I. When Franz Joseph succeeded to its command, the Habsburg holdings included Milan and Venice, Prague and Cracow, as well as Vienna and Budapest. Within two years of his death, the empire had been reduced to the small country, centered on Vienna, that it essentially is today. The Eagles Die is the story of that Habsburg sunset, and of the golden light that Viennese culture shed in the waning days of empire.

Vienna-born Author Marek takes the biographical tack in The Eagles Die, concentrating upon Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth, obviously hoping that it might do for Habsburg Austria what Nicholas and Alexandra did for Romanov Russia. He only partly succeeds, mainly because his principal characters were intensely private, imperial strangers both to their subjects and to each other.

Of the two, Elisabeth fares the better, perhaps because her spirit seems so restlessly contemporary. Though she married Franz Joseph when she was only 16 and gave him a son and three daughters, she played a lonely second fiddle to Franz Joseph's imperious mother Sophie. Eventually, the vivacious queen declared a kind of independence, becoming the adored champion of the cause of home rule for Hungary, traveling incessantly: now to England to ride after hounds, now to Turkey to explore Schliemann's diggings at Troy. She even translated Shakespearean plays into modern Greek. Primping and dieting narcissistically, Elisabeth remained an international beauty until she was 60, when she was killed by an Italian anarchist while boarding a steamer on Lake Geneva in 1898.

Her marriage to Franz Joseph was one of the century's great mismatches. While she fluttered through Europe, he would rise before dawn to be at his royal desk by 5 or 6 in the morning, as absorbed in the minutiae of bureaucracy as a clerk in a tax office. He apparently enjoyed the stultifying formality of the Hofburg. Once, when he awoke very ill in the middle of the night, he was able to bark only one phrase at the physician who had scurried to him: "Formal dress!" If he had any off-guard moments, they were reserved for his marvelously bourgeois relationship with Actress Katherina Schratt, a love that lasted until he died. The Emperor regularly nipped down to Katherina's house for coffee after early morning Mass. Delighted Viennese fiacre drivers called him "Herr Schratt."

Marek makes clear, though, that Franz Joseph was much more than a uniformed bureaucrat. He was literally and psychologically a survivor. He had come to power upon his uncle's abdication during the Revolution of 1848, and he proceeded to put down and punish the rebels ruthlessly. He stubbornly refused to sell the region of Venetia for nearly $1 billion and then lost it--and many thousands of lives--as a result of a disastrous war with Prussia. The survivor's instinct could only have deepened as he saw his family cut down by firing squad and assassin: his younger brother Maximilian as Napoleon Ill's cat's paw in Mexico, his son Rudolf as a result of a crime passionnel suicide pact at Mayerling, his wife at Geneva, his nephew Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo.

Was it some final bitterness over the parade of deaths, asks Marek, that caused Franz Joseph to push Europe, too, into an orgy of killing, as he declared war on Serbia in 1914?

Sans Brahms. The Eagles Die is an uneven book, but it is solidly researched, and when Marek stops to assess the contemporaneous accomplishments of Viennese civilization, his view can be breathtaking. While Franz Joseph fretted over dreary details at his desk, Bruckner, Brahms and Mahler were writing some of history's greatest music, and Johann Strauss some of its gayest. The young Kafka was turning out dismally prophetic stories in Prague (his sisters would die at Auschwitz). The young FreUd was working out his theories of psychoanalysis.

But the sun was dropping rapidly.

Physically, Franz Joseph had helped to build the graceful city that is modern Vienna. Spiritually, he scarcely understood the city. He allowed himself to be dragooned to the opera as a sort of royal advertisement. But the man who ruled Vienna's empire never once heard a symphony by Brahms. -Ma y o Mo h s

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