Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  By the 1980s, Zita’s health continued to generally be good, which was a testament to the longevity of her ancestors. When she celebrated her ninetieth birthday in May 1982, the elderly empress continued to look regal in her simple widow’s dress, which she had accessorized over the years with white lace and the string of pearls she had kept since her coronation. During her birthday celebration at Saint Johannes, an official photograph of the imperial family was taken. In it, Zita is surrounded by no fewer than seventy-five of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. “My ninetieth birthday was a great joy for me for two reasons,” Zita told a family friend. “First, all my children, the majority of my grandchildren and twelve of my great-grandchildren had gathered here together … for the occasion. The oldest of these great-grandchildren had the same birthday as I did, and was all of five years old!”1434 Upon reaching this milestone, Zita became—along with Queen Mary’s daughter-in-law Elizabeth—one of the longest-lived royal consorts in European history. Many media outlets around the world could not help but wax sentimental. One British newspaper described “Zita, the last Empress of Austria” as “the last contemporary survivor of those royal houses of Europe that flourished up to the First World War.” The article also touched a continuing painful issue for the empress.

  Unlike her son Otto, who renounced his claim to the Habsburg throne 20 years ago, Zita is no abdicator. She is still the Empress, and will not have it otherwise. She would like now to return to Vienna, and the Austrian Government would be willing to accommodate her, but for a couple of stumbling blocks. One of these is her own formidable insistence on her ancient status; the other is the Habsburg Law, passed in 1919, which denies entry in Austria of all those members of the Franz-Joseph clan who have not formally renounced their claim to the throne.1435

  A few days after her birthday came the exciting news that Zita had been waiting decades for: the Austrian government finally granted her and the family permission to return from exile—it was speculated that King Juan Carlos was a driving force in repealing the law. On May 16, 1982, Empress Zita of Austria got into a car with her daughter Elisabeth, her son Robert, and his wife, Margharita, bound for their homeland. As their car reached the Austrian border, Zita could hardly contain her excitement. When they arrived at Tufles in the Tyrol on that warm May morning, Zita stepped out of the car to an unexpected sight. The border guards who had assembled snapped to attention, offering the empress a salute. Along with them were a group of dignitaries and government officials who had come to greet, or rather supervise, her. Dressed in her typical black dress and matching hat, the nonagenarian empress made only the slightest wave, since she wanted to avoid attention as much as possible.

  The highlight of the visit was her arrival at the burial site of her daughter Adelhaid. “I went straight to Tulfes,” she wrote a month later, “to pray at the grave of my daughter Adelhaid, and also to give thanks to God in the dear little Tyrolean church there for my return home.” Everyone was entranced by the diminutive empress as she prayed at her daughter’s grave; she finally had the chance to say good-bye. The last stop for the day was to her grandson Archduke Lorenz, who was studying nearby at the University of Innsbruck and who had invited his grandmother for a small meal. The brief trip into Austria lasted only a single day. By that evening, Zita and her family were back at Saint Johannes in Zizers. Afterward, Zita wrote a telling letter to a friend about the experience: “We drove early, without any problems, across the border and into the Tyrol, where, for the first time in sixty-three years of exile, I trod on the soil of the homeland again.… It was for me a great, unforgettable day …”1436

  Over the course of the next seven years, Zita made a number of trips back to Austria. Much to the republican government’s chagrin, she created quite a spectacle. Curiosity about Europe’s last living imperial consort exploded. But owing to her tremendous strength of character and sense of Christian integrity, she surprised many people by her humble, kindly nature. She held a series of interviews with the Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung and also made a number of appearances on national television, but there were no grudges or recriminations against the country that had exiled her. In one such interview, she took a rare moment to look back on her life and those who impacted it.

  All those who preceded me, left their mark on my life, and all those who were and are with me, above all the Emperor who gave meaning and fullness to my existence. Without those who have gone before us, we would be nothing. Whatever happened, whatever I have done, I have done it for those who lived before us. Certainly we have made mistakes, but good will presided over all our enterprises.1437

  This quiet dignity she possessed won over the hearts of the Austrian people, who, on her next visit, unreservedly addressed her as “Your Majesty.”

  During a visit in November 1982, Zita made two very poignant stops. The first was to the church of Mariazell, the famous pilgrimage site where the statue of the Virgin Mary was said to perform miracles. The last time she had been there was on her honeymoon. Upon hearing that the empress had arrived, nearly twenty thousand people flooded to Mariazell to catch a glimpse of her. The second location she visited was especially emotional not only for Zita but for the entire imperial family. At Saint Stephen’s Cathedral, the largest church in Vienna, nearly ten thousand parishioners turned out to offer their respects to the Habsburg family at a special Mass commemorating their struggles over the last seven decades. There was little doubt that “Zita had become news. The world’s press and television looked in on the spectacle of republican Vienna coming to terms with its imperial past.”1438

  By 1988, the ninety-six-year-old empress’s health gave cause for concern. It started as cataracts in her eyes. With a tinge of sadness, she told a friend, “It’s too silly, but, alas, I can’t see a thing.”1439 She was eventually totally blind, forcing her to replace her wristwatch with a room clock that announced the time. The other residents at Zizers noticed little change in the empress’s lifestyle, although she was now attended by a nurse and an Italian maid. She continued her daily routine almost uninterrupted. She knew the corridors of the building so well that she rarely needed help getting around. The biggest noticeable difference was that, now, the empress in black carried a long white walking stick. In the summer, she went to visit her daughter Elisabeth at Waldstein in Austria where she fell ill with pneumonia. Not until the end of August was she well enough to return to Zizers. There, she spent the fall and winter bedridden, except for brief periods when she sat up in an old armchair near her bed.

  By February 1989, no one could deny the truth: the last empress was dying. At the beginning of March, she telephoned Otto at his home in Pöcking, Bavaria, with the message, “I am dying. Come and see me.”1440 She spent her final two weeks in her sparsely decorated room at Saint Johannes, surrounded by her many children and grandchildren. Each of her sons and daughters took turns sitting with her night and day. She stopped taking any food or water for nearly all that time. Zita surprised her family by her lack of nostalgia at the end. She did not share any reminiscences of the extraordinary life she had led but was instead only concerned with the future of her beloved Europe. Otto later told a family friend, “In the last talks we had she did not once mention things past. Instead, she asked me about what was happening now, about the latest situation in Eastern Europe and in the European Community.”1441 On March 13, the curtain descended on the life of the last matriarch of the Habsburg Empire. That day, a special blessing arrived from Pope John Paul II, which was read to the empress by her old friend Bishop Vonderach. Just after 1:00 a.m. on March 14, 1989, Zita died peacefully in the presence of a nurse and her daughter-in-law Regina.

  One of the residents at Saint Johannes remembered how “we were all invited up to see her in her room. There she was in just a nice dress, with her pearls around her neck. They were not just any pearls—they were the kind you don’t see today, the kind only royalty use to have.”1442 Austrian chancellor Franz Vranitsky ordered nati
onal mourning and granted the long-suffering empress perhaps the greatest possible tribute: an imperial state funeral in Vienna—the first since Franz Joseph’s in 1916. The return of almost the entire Habsburg family to Vienna in 1989 was a moment of profound significance for Austria, which was beginning to move on from the horrors of the early twentieth century. Empress Zita’s funeral was symptomatic of the country’s eagerness to take pride in its rich imperial history once again. Tony Judt, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author and expert on European history, was in Vienna in 1989 and recalled the atmosphere in the former Habsburg capital.

  Vienna in 1989 was thus a good place from which to “think” Europe.… the very streets of the Austrian capital bore witness to the chasm of silence separating Europe’s tranquil present from its discomforting past. The imposing, confident buildings lining the great Ringstrasse were a reminder of Vienna’s one-time imperial vocation—though the Ring itself seemed somehow too big and too grand to serve as a mere quotidian artery for commuters in a medium-sized European capital—and the city was justifiably proud of its public edifices and civic spaces. Indeed, Vienna was much given to invoking older glories.1443

  Austria’s desire to “invoke older glories” may be one of the reasons that, perhaps more than any of her imperial counterparts, Empress Zita’s funeral was the most steeped in the rich, vibrant traditions of the past. The arrangements were on such a grand scale that the funeral was estimated to cost £200,000. In keeping with tradition, Zita’s heart was interred in Switzerland at the Muri Abbey—the first church ever built by the Habsburgs, in 1027. From Zizers, her coffin, upon which was placed Austria’s medieval archducal crown, was taken to the Klosterneuburg Abbey overlooking Vienna on March 29. For a day and a half, tens of thousands of people filed past the draped coffin to pay their last respects to the woman who had held on to the dream of Austria’s glory for nearly three-quarters of a century. One mourner said, “I vote Socliast and I’m no monarchist, but she was our Empress and I wanted to pay my respects.”1444 One of her biographers summed up the significance that her death had across the continent: “She had been the last tangible link with the vanished Europe that had existed two world wars before. The photo-portrait taken of her as a young princess of Bourbon-Parma on her engagement to the heir of the Austro-Hungarian Empire gazed out from magazines and newspapers across Europe and America.”1445 On the evening of March 30, the coffin was transported to the inner courtyard of the Hofburg Palace for a small service before it was moved by a torchlight procession to Saint Stephen’s Cathedral.

  The emotional funeral at Saint Stephen’s was held at 3:00 p.m. on April 1, 1989, sixty-seven years to the day since Emperor Charles I died in Funchal on Madeira. The primary mourners included two hundred members of the Habsburg and Bourbon families, accompanied by another six hundred guests from other royal houses from around the world. More than six thousand people attended the service, while thousands more lined the streets outside—panegyrists claimed there were around four hundred thousand spectators, while conservative estimates placed it as low as forty thousand. Millions more watched the funeral on television. So many people arrived from across the former Austro-Hungarian Empire that the service was read aloud in German, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, and Italian. The four-and-a-half hour funeral mass was conducted by two archbishops and four bishops.

  When the service was completed, the funeral procession moved from Saint Stephen’s to the Church of the Capuchins less than two miles away, where the Habsburg family crypt is located. It was here, among 144 Habsburgs—including twelve emperors and sixteen empresses—that Zita was laid to rest. The final delivery of her coffin was a moment deeply immersed in Austria’s imperial traditions. The master of ceremonies at the head of the funeral procession knocked three times on the church’s door. The first time, the guardian monk asked who was seeking entry. The queen of Bohemia, Croatia, Slavonia, and so on, the master of ceremonies declared. He did not know her, the monk replied. After a second knock, the monk again asked who was seeking entry. Zita, the empress of Austria and queen of Hungry, the master of ceremonies announced. Again, the monk answered he did not know her. On the third knock, after the monk asked who was seeking entry, the master of ceremonies said it was Zita, a mortal sinner. The door opened wide and the pallbearers placed the coffin in the crypt.

  The New York Times sent one of its staff to report on the funeral, which was described in vivid detail in its April 2 issue.

  Old Vienna dusted off its imperial finery today to lay to rest Austria’s last Empress, paying a regal tribute to a woman who remained quietly true to her lost crown and to the late Emperor through seven decades of exile. For the first time since the 600-year Austro-Hungarian monarchy was dissolved in 1919, the ornate black imperial catafalque – borrowed from the Museum at Schonbrunn Palace – rolled past the old palaces and baroque temples of central Vienna to the imperial burial vault. There, under the Capuchin Church, Zita, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, was laid to rest among the richly decorated caskets of the Hapsburgs.1446

  More than twenty years later, Zita’s life, death, and legacy are still felt, especially in Roman Catholic circles, whose faith she so devotedly defended. As recently as 2010, a Catholic periodical published an article about Zita, giving her a moving epitaph.

  Following the example of Charles, whose memory she kept alive, she never abdicated her rights, and it was as Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary that she was interred on April 1, 1989, in the Crypt of the Capuchins in Vienna. The popular fervour of which she was the object in the course of this ceremony [her funeral] showed an astonished world that, after seventy years of the republic, Zita remained in Austria the Landesmutter, the “mother of the country,” a terrestrial image of Her who is venerated at the sanctuary of Mariazell in the heart of the former Empire under the title of “Magna Mater Austriæ, Magna Domina Hungarorum, Mater Gentium Slavorum.”1447

  Empress Zita’s death at Saint Johannes and funeral in Vienna in 1989 brings to a close the final chapter in the lives of these four very special women, each of whom reigned as consorts of the last European emperors. Raised in an era where responsibility, commitment, sacrifice, and duty before self were elevated as the highest ideals, they embraced their new lives, adapted, and came to love their countries and peoples. They gave all they were for their husbands, their families, and ultimately, their empires.

  Epilogue

  Recent events in Central and Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet empire built in Yalta…have drawn attention once more to the historical events which have led to the present situation. We must go back to their roots, which lie deep down, especially to the affairs of World War I and their consequences. Had different decisions been taken then the tragedies of our continent, whether Hitlerism or Communism, could perhaps have been avoided.1448

  —Dr. Otto von Habsburg, 1990

  The impressive state funeral of Empress Zita of Austria was a fitting tribute to Europe’s last imperial consort, who also had the distinction of being the longest-living monarch—reigning or consort—in Austrian history. Her funeral brought the memory of the imperial era into the modern world and put a face on the profound impact of a very special group of royal women. As the gothic black funeral catafalque wound its way through the crowded streets of Vienna, one of the most important eras in European history came to a symbolic end.

  Empress Zita never lived to see her dearest wish come true, the restoration of the Habsburg dynasty to the Austrian throne. She did, however, proudly live to see Otto take his place on the world stage. In 1979, he became the first Habsburg to return to an active role in politics when he became a member of the European Parliament, which paved the way for the formation of the European Union. Otto worked as a senior member of that parliament for thirty years, advocating the development of former Habsburg territories like Croatia, Hungary, and Slovenia that suffered under decades of Communism. He remarked in 2007, “we are a politically very engaged fa
mily so that for instance I arrived today from Hungary, where I had several meetings and shall leave the day after tomorrow for Croatia for a series of meetings there, too.” Even at the age of ninety-five, he maintained a “strong engagement in the political action” of twenty-first-century Europe.1449 Otto’s two youngest daughters, Gabriela and Walburga, have followed in his footsteps and taken up careers in politics. Gabriela is the current Georgian ambassador to Germany, and Walburga is a member of the Swedish Parliament.

  Archduchess Regina died in February 2010. Otto died the following year, on July 4, 2011, at the age of ninety-eight. Otto’s death came shortly after the decision by the Austrian government that now allows members of the Habsburg family to run for the presidency of Austria. Along with King George VI, the Duke of Windsor, and the Grand Duchess Anastasia, Otto von Habsburg was one of the most politically and historically significant of the twenty-six children born to the four empresses.1450 His six-hour funeral on July 16 was a mirror reflection of Zita’s funeral twenty-two years earlier, presided over by diplomats, politicians, and crowned heads of Europe. Otto was laid to rest in the imperial crypt alongside his mother. His heart was embalmed in Budapest, the city that lived in his heart for decades. Otto and Regina had seven children and twenty-two grandchildren. The remains of Emperor Charles I continue to reside in the cemetery in Funchal where he was buried in 1922. His heart was later exhumed and moved next to his wife’s at the Muri Abbey in Switzerland. The Habsburg family’s requests for a state funeral in Vienna have been denied.