A Murderous Affair: The Habsburgs’ Great Scandal (Part 1)

**Tom Holland** (0:11)
Count Hoyos and the Prince of Coburg ordered Loschek to break down the door. Out of breath, half crying, Loschek whispered that he had to inform their serene lordships that a lady, the Baroness Mary Vetsera, was staying in his Imperial Highness's room.
Coburg and Hoyos recoiled. They retreated to the billiard room. Loschek kept knocking and calling. A kitchen maid began to whimper. Within a minute, the two emerged and repeated their order.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (0:49)
Break down the door.

**Tom Holland** (0:51)
Some servant had already brought a wood chopping axe. Loschek raised it to smash the lock. The lock resisted. Loschek hacked away at the white painted door panels. The axe crashed. The panels splintered.
Ravens fluttered up from the snow outside. The dogs barked and howled to the echoing blows. Loschek hacked out a gash. The gash became a hole. Framed in jagged wood, smoky with blurred candles, dark with the drawn blinds, the room inside was visible.
Only then did Loschek drop his axe.
The silence which followed changed the empire. So that is the climactic scene from Frederick Norton's great book, A Nervous Splendor, which is a portrait of the founder of the century Vienna at the end of the 1880s. It is a tremendously gothic account of the most notorious murder-suicide in European history. A scandal so fantastically lurid that it makes the travails of our own beloved royal family, well, like nothing very much at all in comparison. The context couldn't be more colourful. We're just outside Vienna. The year is 1888 Vienna, of course, at this period, the city of Mahler, of Klimt, the young Freud busy developing his theories of psychoanalysis, his notions about the sexual etiology of neurosis and the question of sex and neurosis will not be irrelevant to this story. Vienna is the capital of an empire that is struggling to cope with the forces that in the 20th century will have an absolutely explosive effect. Nationalism, antisemitism, a host of other modern pathologies. But the scene I just described, Dominic, I mean, it does read like something out of a kind of 19th century Gothic thriller, doesn't it? Like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (3:09)
Yeah, absolutely it does. So, hi everybody. The scene is a remote hunting lodge in the woods outside Vienna, and the two principal characters.
So I'm going to give the game away right away. Our killer is the 30-year-old heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. He's Crown Prince Rudolf, an idealistic, haggard man. He's off his face on morphine and champagne. He is riddled with gonorrhea, and he's the kind of man who keeps a skull as a paperweight.

**Tom Holland** (3:37)
I mean, he's another of the many people in history who look like producer Callum, an astonishing number of them. But maybe the interesting thing about this, we did our series on Jack the Ripper, and we poo-pooed the notion that a Crown Prince could be a killer in that series. But here, there's not much doubt, is there?

**Dominic Sandbrook** (3:55)
There's no doubt whatsoever. So there's Crown Prince Rudolf, and then there is his accomplice and victim, and this is his teenage mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, who is a fashionista. She's a party girl, she's a social climber, and she has become infatuated with him to the point of self-destruction. And it's a brilliant, brilliant story. I mean, all through the decades, writers and artists have been drawn to it. There are manga, comics, there are plays, there are operas, there's ballet, Kenneth Macmillan's Great Ballet from the 1970s, a real favourite at the Royal Ballet in London.

**Tom Holland** (4:28)
Yeah, because it was staged this spring at Covent Garden.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:31)
Yes. So it's a fantastic story, and we'll get straight into it, and we'll begin with The Time and Place, which is a great favourite of The Rest Is History. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, so worlds of gigantic cakes, even more gigantic moustaches, insanely dapper uniforms, waltzes, nationalism, simmering beneath the surface, the subconscious sexual psychosis. Exactly, we are here for all of it. Now to remind listeners, particularly people who didn't hear our series about the buildup to the First World War and the Austro-Hungarian Empire last featured, it's in Central Europe, it's this mosaic of languages and ethnicities. Half of it is ruled from Vienna, half of it from Budapest.
There are 13 million German speakers, 10 million Hungarians, 5 million Czechs, there are Poles, Italians, Slovenes, Jews, you name it. And what binds them is their unity to the Habsburg dynasty. So it's the 13th century dynasty of the Habsburgs. Rudolf, of course, is a Habsburg. In his book that you mentioned, his brilliant book, A Nervous Splendour, Frederick Morton calls them manipulative, industrious, strangely modest, inexorable, decent, stodgy, staunch. Drabness was their secret, drabness and patience.